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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE BOHLEN LECTURES FOR 1895 

THE WORLD AND THE 
WRESTLERS 

PERSONALITY AND RESPONSIBILITY 



BY y/ 

HUGH MILLER THOMPSON 



BISHOP OF MISSISSIPPI 




NEW YORK 
THOMAS WHITTAKER 

2 AND 3 BIBLE HOUSE 
1895 







Copyright, 1895, 
By Thomas Whittaker. 



The John Bohlen Lectureship. 



John Bohlen, who died in Philadelphia on the 26th 
day of April, 1874, bequeathed to trustees a fund of One 
Hundred Thousand Dollars, to be distributed to reli- 
gious and charitable objects in accordance with the 
well-known wishes of the testator. 

By a deed of trust, executed June 2, 1875, the trus- 
tees, under the will of Mr. Bohlen, transferred and 
paid over to "The Rector, Church Wardens, and Ves- 
trymen of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadel- 
phia," in trust, a sum of money for certain designated 
purposes, out of which fund the sum of Ten Thousand 
Dollars was set apart for the endowment of The John 
Bohlen Lectureship, upon the following terms and 
conditions: 

" The money shall be invested in good substantial 
and safe securities, and held in trust for a fund to be 
called The John Bohlen Lectureship, and the income 
shall be applied annually to the payment of a qualified 
person, whether clergyman or layman, for the delivery 
and publication of at least one hundred copies of two 
or more lecture sermons. These lectures shall be de- 
livered at such time and place, in the city of Philadel- 



phia, as the persons nominated to appoint the lecturer 
shall from time to time determine, giving at least six 
months' notice to the person appointed to deliver the 
same, when the same may conveniently be done, and in 
no case selecting the same person as lecturer a second 
time within a period of five years. The payment shall 
be made to said lecturer, after the lectures have been 
printed and received by the trustees, of all the income 
for the year derived from said fund, after defraying 
the expense of printing the lectures and the other inci- 
dental expenses attending the same. 

4 4 The subject of such lectures shall be such as is 
within the terms set forth in the will of the Rev. John 
Bampton, for the delivery of what are known as the 
'Bampton Lectures,' at Oxford, or any other subject 
distinctively connected with or relating to the Christian 
Religion. 

" The lecturer shall be appointed annually in the 
month of May, or as soon thereafter as can conven- 
iently be done, by the persons who for the time being 
shall hold the offices of Bishop of the Protestant Epis- 
copal Church of the Diocese in which is the Church of 
the Holy Trinity ; the Rector of said Church ; the Pro- 
fessor of Biblical Learning, the Professor of System- 
atic Divinity, and the Professor of Ecclesiastical His- 
tory, in the Divinity School of the Protestant Episcopal 
Church in Philadelphia. 

i% In case either of said offices are vacant, the others 
may nominate the lecturer." 

Under this trust, the Right Rev. Hugh Miller 
Thompson, D.D., D.C.L., Bishop of the Diocese of 
Mississippi, was appointed to deliver the lectures for 
the year 1895. 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE PAGE 

I. Personality of Man 5 

II. Personality of God 45 

III. Responsibility of God 79 

IV. Responsibility of Man in 



LECTURE I. 
PERSONALITY OF MAN. 



S 



And Jacob was left alone ; and there wrestled a Man with him 
until the breaking of the day. And when He saw that He prevailed 
not against him, He touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow 
of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with Him. And 
He said, Let Me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not 
let Thee go, except Thou bless me. And He said unto him, What is 
thy name? And he said, Jacob. And He said, Thy name shall 
be called no more Jacob, but Israel : for as a prince hast thoti power 
with God and with ?nen, and hast prevailed. And Jacob asked 
Him, and said, Tell me, I pray Thee, Thy name. And He said, 
Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after My na?ne ? And He blessed 
him there. And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel : for I 
have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved. 

Gen. xxxii. 24-30. 



6 



THE WORLD AND THE WRESTLERS. 



LECTURE I. 

PERSONALITY OF MAN. 

TT is my purpose in these Lectures — the duty of 
^ delivering which I have accepted with great 
diffidence — I will not say to discuss, I will much 
less say to explain, but to call attention to, and 
make suggestions upon, the fact of Personality, 
which is to me the most wonderful fact in my 
knowledge — I think, indeed, I may say in the 
whole circle of human knowledge. 

That I say " I " ; that I speak to other " Fs " ; 
that I deal with them, meet them, talk to them, 
love some of them more than I love myself ; that 
some of them have gone from my sight; that I 
have stood by the graves where we buried their 
material forms, and yet that they are living to 
me; will, indeed, never die to me; are more liv- 

7 



8 



PERSONALITY OF MAN 



ing and more dear and near to me than other 
"Fs" which are full of what we call life and 
action — these things, I say, which are facts, and 
to me, at least, are far more wonderful and closely- 
important facts than any others, must be, like 
other facts, accepted and dealt with. 

They are practically excluded from the circle of 
what, in our day, is called Science, which has taken 
for herself as yet a very narrow range. 

The science of man is not biology, nor even 
psychology, nor sociology. The most complete 
discussion of the physical make-up and bodily 
origin of man, the same discussion of his intellec- 
tual powers, and the added study of his social 
habits and conditions have not grasped the real 
question. 

One can, for instance, study biology in oysters, 
in barnacles, in mosquitoes. (And the biology of 
these last is, in some respects, far more curious 
than that of man.) One can study psychology in 
apes. I love to study it in dogs, and in them it 
is wonderful. One can study sociology in bees, 
and devote a well-spent life to it ; and one might 
— which nobody has yet done — devote a life to 
the study of sociology in ants, with great profit, 
perhaps, certainly with great interest to himself 



PERSONALITY OF MAN. 9 

and others. But none of these sciences touch at 
all the questions I have suggested. 

Shall we go on excluding from Science the 
most close, pressing, experienced facts with which 
we are familiar? How comes the "I"? What 
does it mean to be an "I" and say "I"? to 
stand by itself and separate itself from the entire 
universe completely ; yes, completely, and just as 
completely from all other "Fs"? How comes it 
to feel that it can stand alone, must stand alone, 
indeed, very often, and assert itself in the teeth of 
all circumstances and of all men, and say, " I will/' 
or " I will not " ? How comes It most insolently, 
in one point of view, to stand before ten thousand 
other " Fs " and say in their scowling faces, 
" This ought to be," " This ought not to be;" " I 
will die, but I will stand by it, that this is wrong " 
or " this is right " ? How comes this ? 

Shall we ever have a branch of Science called 
" pneumatology " ? Science has never reached 
the pneuma yet. Hitherto she has dealt with men 
as animals, somata, psychai, bodies, living things- 
bodies in their biology: the way they live and 
continue their kind ; science of vegetables, of cab- 
bages and carrots ; science of cholera germs, diph- 
theria, and smallpox. 



IO PERSONALITY OF MAN 

With psychology, in a way : what sense the 
things and creatures have; how they manage to 
keep up the psyche, the life, the arrangements 
and provisions for existence and continuance. 

With sociology also : how the things and crea- 
tures live together and repel and attract each 
other; the sociology of cucumbers and squashes, 
which every gardener ought to know or he will 
spoil both crops. Indeed, a step farther, rising 
even to ourselves — a vast stride ; that higher races 
and lower races of men, both living together in 
equal conditions, must strike a general average, 
and the high must go half-way down if the low 
is to come half-way up. 

But with pneumatology Science bows herself 
out. I believe Science is wrong by her own 
definition of herself. Why should she leave the 
pneuma to religion alone? Why abandon it in 
despair to what some of her disciples consider the 
dreams and imaginations of mere religion? 

There are the facts! — facts evident, insistent, 
close about our paths and about our beds; facts 
of the " I " and its duties, its transgressions and 
their penalties, its days and its nights, its com- 
panionships and its loneliness, its awful experi- 
ences, its visions of the high, white heavens and 



PERSONALITY OF MAN. 



I I 



of the awful, low-down, lurid hells. Why has 
Science walled all these facts out ? 

Will you pardon me for saying that I think 
Science is very small so far? Small, because 
she ignores the facts right at her door, puts on 
her spectacles, and goes round,' like an ancient 
witch, in the dark and the swamp, to find " facts " 
which, if they be facts, are of no great vital conse- 
quence to men, and never deigns to deal with 
or help to explain the facts that stare me in the 
face at my hearthside, at my lying down, at my 
rising up. 

But Science is in her childhood yet, and must 
grow; or, to use her own phrases, " develop " or 
" evolve/' She has millions of long miles before 
her, and possibly thousands of long years, and she 
is creeping yet; has, perhaps, by God's blessing, 
in these last years, been provided with a go-cart 
(I hope so), that she may learn the sooner to walk 
— namely, the working hypothesis of evolution. 

So let us be very thankful that there is any 
movement at all, on the line of knowing things, by 
the human psyche — any movement beyond trying 
to know how to provide the human soma with 
better food, drink, and shelter. 

It is inevitable that, at last, there shall be some 



12 



PERSONALITY OF MAN 



attempt to know something of man ; and that 
means, for us Nicene Christians, something of 
God. The Pneuma will seek to be known also. 

For man is pneuma, and God is Pneuma. The 
Lord put those two facts together long ago. " God 
is a Spirit [Pneuma] : and they that worship Him 
must worship Him in spirit and in truth.' ' 

I believe there is a science of the pneuma pos- 
sible, and to be formulated sometime — a collec- 
tion and formulation of the facts concerning egos, 
Ts — that is, men and God. These are the only 
Ys that Science can recognize and investigate. 

I think these are legitimate subjects, too, of 
scientific investigation ; I do not mean speculative 
or metaphysical word-confusion, I mean scientific 
investigation upon the strictest and most peremp- 
tory lines. 

It will take many ages, perhaps, before Science, 
working up through bathybius, monads, and mol- 
lusks, developing slowly, as the law of development 
compels, will venture upon the study of an " I " 
even finite and earthly, and all the facts that " I " 
holds, and all that grow out of them. 

It will take, no doubt, endless myriads of ages, 
and in other worlds, before Science reaches the 
point of trying to study and understand the awful, 



PERSONALITY OF MAN. 13 

infinite, eternal " I Am that I Am." And yet " to 
know God, this is life eternal.'' But this will be 
science of the pneuma, not of the psyche. 

I believe there is no knowing man apart from 
knowing God. These two have always gone 
together — somehow are always bound together. 
You may know all about a horse, I think; all 
about a mule, even (a much more " differentiated " 
animal) — I was going to say, without knowing 
anything about God ; but I doubt even that. I 
am sure you can know nothing about man, in the 
differentiation which makes him man and distin- 
guishes him from either the bird or the animal, 
without knowing a great deal about God. You 
certainly cannot know much about God unless 
you know a good deal about man. 

For these two are " Fs," and, as far as we can 
study them in this visible world, are the only 
"Fs." I hesitate to say it, yet why should I? 
In scientific speech I should be compelled to say 
it. In Nicene speech I say it continually. These 
two " Fs " are of one species! From the one I 
can at least begin the study of the other. " All 
power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth." 
A Man, remember, said this. He is a Man to-day, 
as He was then. He will remain a Man forever. 



14 PERSONALITY OF MAN 

We start with that and all its consequences (and 
they are overwhelming) as a matter of faith. 

In the end it will be a matter of Science — that 
Man governs the universe. The end of all living, 
saving faith is knowledge. Faith is tentative, 
helps you to scientia at last — the outcome of faith, 
that for which faith was given. Faith in this 
realm furnishes, that is, the " working hypothesis." 

I have therefore decided in these Lectures to 
ask you to let your thought play about the sub- 
ject of Personality. It will, in the ages coming, be 
a subject of scientific investigation. It is, I need 
scarcely say, not such a subject yet, and never- 
theless it lies at the basis of all Science. Unless 
there be an " I " to know, there can be no know- 
ledge. 

Of course I am aware that " metaphysics,' ' as it 
is called, studies and has studied the ego. But 
I am using the word " science " here in its strict 
meaning — the gathering and coordinating of as- 
certained, visible, hearable, or tangible facts. In 
that sense Science has declined, so far, to deal 
with the "I" — much to my surprise, and your 
surprise, if you will consider all that the neglect 
implies. But, as I say again, Science is yet in the 
germ, and will develop into somewhat really vital 



PERSONALITY OF MAN. 



15 



as man develops and becomes more a man and 
more an " I." 

My line is the humble one of suggesting. I 
have no theory. I have no science myself. I 
am not anxious to have you agree with me. I am 
desirous to set you thinking. To think is itself an 
end, and a great one. To think on high things is 
a noble end and a sufficient, whether or not you 
come to a logical, formulated conclusion. 

Indeed, logical, formulated, walled-in, and fin- 
ished conclusions on the essentials of things are 
sure to be false. They are only true in the count- 
ing and arranging and measuring of the outward 
relations of things. 

For instance, you can weigh an alleged ton of 
coal, and come to an unerring logical and mathe- 
matical conclusion that eighteen hundred pounds 
is not a ton, although you may have paid for a ton ! 

But you cannot weigh a spiritual or even an in- 
tellectual force, and decide how many foot-pounds 
of such energy were exhausted by the dealer in 
cheating you out of those two hundred pounds of 
coal! 

To say what I have to say on this subject of 
Personality, I make my starting-point one of the 



i6 



PERSONALITY OF MAN 



most illogical and, to the lower intelligence (the 
psyche of St. Paul, the invisible part we share 
with our dogs and horses), the most mysterious of 
all the incidents in the Old Testament. It appeals 
entirely to the pneuma, as you will see — the spirit- 
ual understanding ; that which differentiates man. 
You cannot bring to its full understanding the 
psychical intelligence at all, which is nevertheless 
so imperative — that intelligence which the horse 
exercises when he goes to the watering-trough, 
and man exercises when he decides that one thou- 
sand dollars at ten percent, per annum is just as 
profitable, as an investment, as two thousand 
dollars at five percent, per annum, supposing the 
security be equally good. 

The incident is outside all that, though all that 
lay near it, as it always does — in this case very close. 

It is in the realm of the pneuma ; deals with pneu- 
mata, " Fs," personalities ; and is discerned only in 
the realm of realities — the kingdom spiritual. 

The incident is wholly mysterious — dark with 
the night and the desert silences, awful with the 
loneliness of the midnight stars and the empty 
world, burst into at the last with the red shafts of 
the dawn. 

But the mystery throws no shadow upon the 



PERSONALITY OF MAN. \ J 

central fact. Two " Ts " are here, two " thou's," 
two persons. 

They are at grips with each other. Each clasps, 
holds, strains, questions the other. There is the 
sense that each has a hold upon the other. The 
hold may be for good or for ill. But it is a wrest- 
ling hold ; contains the power to question, and to 
lame or to bless. 

One of the wrestlers we know. He is just a 
man, and by no means a noble or a strong man. 
His life has been a mean, tricky life from the be- 
ginning. He cheats his father, old and blind ; he 
turns deaf ears to the cry of his starving brother 
for food. He has it, but refuses to share it save at 
the price he may wring from utmost need. And 
the brother is his twin brother, and he has already 
cheated him out of his father's blessing. 

The man has fled from the face of the angry 
brother — am I wrong in saying the righteously 
indignant brother? All times are alike to men, 
since men are found the same in all times. And 
to take advantage of a brother's need, to traffic in 
his want and hunger, to forestall the market and 
make one's self rich out of his misery, to play upon 
his simplicity and trust, even play upon his weakness 
and his sins, is as old as brotherhood, you see. 



1 8 PERSONALITY OF MAN 

There is nothing of this sort in our dealings in 
produce exchange or coal market that was not at 
work in this man — the supplanter. 

He had bad blood in him. The law of heredity 
is tyrannous. He had been taught his trickery by 
his mother, who came by it legitimately. It is 
bad enough to be taught ill by one's father — to 
inherit evil from him. Greatly worse is it to in- 
herit wickedness from, or be taught wickedness 
by, one's mother! 

The serene, stately, dreamy desert prince Isaac, 
who walked abroad in the splendid eventides of 
the Orient to muse in the meadows alone, was 
true son of his princely father. But this wrest- 
ling, straining man, caught at last in his own evil 
nets, owed it to the bad strain from his beautiful 
mother's Mesopotamian kindred. 

Nay, Science does not teach us anything that 
we do not read on the pages of these old Biblia, 
these books which the spiritual consciousness of 
the ancient children of God selected, and by that 
consciousness canonized, and held, by whomsoever 
written, edited, or revised within her, as sacred 
and inspired upon God's nature and man's, and 
the ethical relations between these two. 

Evil fruit from evil seed always ! Wrong work- 



PERSONALITY OF MAN 19 

ing out further wrong! Bad children from bad 
fathers ! The terrible persistence of the evil thing 
done, and the glorious blessing of the thing well 
done! The awful abiding of the fact, and the 
fruitfulness thereof forevermore ! 

From the face of the brother the prescient 
mother sent her favorite to her own kin. Some- 
how it always goes so. It is the ethical law. The 
liar goes to liars, the trickster finds himself among 
tricksters, the knave among knaves. One goes 
to his own place in this world. Shall he not go 
to his own place in all worlds? Even Judas has 
friends somewhere and finds society. He goes 
"to his own place." 

Yet even to such an one as Jacob come, in the 
loneliness of the night, the visions that tell him of 
a loftier life and a higher order. 1 Wheresoever 
he comes into nature and her silences the upper 
realm breaks on this man strangely. " Strangely," 
do I say? Is it not the rule? Alone on the 
mountain summit, alone with the stars, alone with 
the sea, what does the soul not utterly gone to the 
other side care for flocks and herds, for stocks or 
bonds or bank-accounts, so only he sees once that 
the real eternal home lies above, and one must 

1 Gen. xxviii. 10-15. 



20 



PERSONALITY OF MAN. 



climb, not crawl, and the long, strange ascent must 
be toward the everlasting light! 

So what we call " nature " — which is God's ex- 
pression of Himself to His child while man stays 
His child — calls him to worship, and in her vast 
aisles and naves, which we but poorly imitate in 
our noblest architecture, lifts him to the splendor 
of what lies above all summits, and the worship 
that chants its liturgies beyond the gold-and-pur- 
ple rood-screens of all earthly dawns, where he 
makes the snow-crags his altars. 

God walks the mountains. God dwells in the 
thick darkness. God speaks in the thunder, in 
the roar of the cataract, in league-long breakers 
thundering on the shore. One meets His foot- 
steps on the loneliness of the illimitable sea, 
comes near Him in the vast silences of desolate 
lands. 

The grand nature-liturgy of the old Hebrew 
books is reverent as it is true, fearless as it is 
spiritual. It is chanted from Moses to David, 
from David to the prophets. They all have caught 
the stately rhythm of the worship of the living 
God, who is present, ruling, working, revealing 
Himself in star and flower and little bird, in ava- 
lanche and ice summits, in the little rivulet singing 



PERSONALITY OF MAN. 



21 



low through the clover, in the roar of the cataract 
plunging from the steep. 

So it came even to this man, who still remained, 
notwithstanding his sin, a child of Abraham, to 
see his vision in the desert as he fled to Padan-aram. 
But in the vision he saw only what he was able to 
see. It is thus always. The divinest vision reveals 
what the seer is capable of seeing. In the ladder 
let down from heaven, in the angels ascending and 
descending, he sees only what he is capable of see- 
ing, hears only what he is capable of hearing. 

The ladder, you will observe, suggests no climb- 
ing for him. The voice of the Lord from the 
summit has no call to a nobler life. That life has 
run on low levels thus far, and still, even from 
opened heaven, this man hears only of flocks and 
herds and increase and an earthly success. 

And still, even so, it was much. There was a 
world higher than this. There was a God who 
could bless, and from whom one could seek good 
things, and who loved to give them. He was 
good, at least to some men, and would give them 
many good things and keep old promises, for He 
was true and righteous — so only men served and 
loved Him. There were steps up to Him, and 
messengers to come and go. 



22 



PERSONALITY OF MAN. 



There are profound lessons in that first desert 
vision, though I cannot dwell upon them here. 

One of them is that God necessarily meets men 
on the levels where they stand ; that to raise them 
He stoops — must finally stoop to Gethsemane 
and the cross, indeed ; and also that, with heaven 
opened, they have eyes to see only what they can 
see, and ears to hear only what they can hear. 

The man rises in the morning and tries to make 
a bargain with Him whom he has seen in the 
vision. It is a pledge of so much offering and so 
much service for so many sheep and oxen, kine 
and camels. It reveals the spiritual nature at its 
lowest. Still it is a spiritual nature, and believes 
in a spiritual world above sheep and oxen. 

And the man goes on his journey, and it fares 
with him according to the vicissitudes of an en- 
tirely earthly life. 

The life for twenty years thereafter was lived 
on exceedingly low levels. It was a war of wits 
between himself and his uncle Laban; and the 
wives he married seem to have been true daughters 
of their father, and thoroughly fit for the husband. 

One does not wonder that the elder brother, 
impetuous, imperious, princely, preferred the 
daughters of Heth, the princesses of the desert, to 



PERSONALITY OF MAN 23 

these scheming relatives of his, who could help 
the husband to cheat the father, and in their elope- 
ment should even rob the poor old semi-idolater 
of his ancestral images — fetishes, teraphim, what- 
ever they were — on which he thought his luck 
depended. 

It could not be that the beautiful Rachel stole 
them and lied about them because she put much 
faith in their power herself, after seeing how 
poorly they had served her father against the 
schemes of her husband. It is sad to think they 
must have been of silver (there was no gold in cir- 
culation in those days — no question of " bimetal- 
lism ,, ), and that she stole them for their intrinsic 
value. 

It is not at all, you will say, an edifying story ; 
and certainly the family arrangements and the 
shrewd trickery of Padan-aram hold no example 
to you or me. But they hold this. Critics tell us 
to throw away these old Biblia because they are 
clearly not of God, in that they relate such doings 
by people asserted to be under God's special 
charge and benediction ; that, indeed, they are 
immoral in such assertion, and unfit to be supposed 
the revelation of a righteous God. 

I confess the strength of a part of the objection 



24 



PERSONALITY OF MAN 



from the standpoint of merely literary criticism, 
lower or higher. 

Of course the Biblia — the collection of books — 
history, poetry (dramatic, idyllic, lyric, epic), law, 
ritual, folk-lore, prophesy — may be, and I, for one, 
frankly concede ought to be, from one side, treated 
simply as literature and nothing else — a collection 
of ancient books. Only one must not carry into 
them the ethics and opinions of this century, and 
criticize them on those grounds. That is not lit- 
erary criticism at all. We must understand that 
the literary critic must remain content with his 
chosen occupation. He has nothing whatever to 
do with the ethics, the manners, or the opinions of 
the book he criticizes. He deals with it simply as 
a piece of written matter about whose age, author- 
ship, and literary style alone he is concerned. 

I think you will concede that this is not a very 
lofty, though it may be a necessary and very useful, 
business. Take an illustration. A critic who would 
spend his time on minute examination of the let- 
ters and words of Shakespeare's dramas, and who 
might even finally reach the conclusion that former 
editors were all wrong in the arrangement of the 
dramas, and that " Hamlet " was written before 
"Timon," and that " rare Ben Jonson " redacted 



PERSONALITY OF MAN 2$ 

"King Lear" — that, indeed, Shakespeare did not 
write " Lear/' " Macbeth," or " The Tempest " at 
all, but another man of the same name did — might 
be a very useful man, and, in his own opinion, 
imagine he had done the world service ; but just 
as a bit of common sense and general usefulness, 
we would hardly call him a high critic, much less 
a " higher " critic than the man who taught all 
readers and lovers of the mass of literature we call 
" Shakespeare " to find subtler meanings, deeper 
philosophies, profounder insight into man and 
nature and the nature of the Lord of them both, 
than they had ever before seen or even suspected. 

It abides with me as one of the queer, topsy- 
turvy puzzles that crop up outside the country of 
the Sphinx, that the term " Higher Criticism " 
should have been arrogated for themselves and 
conceded by others to gentlemen whose business 
upon a body of ancient literature begins and ends 
with criticizing its words and letters, and deriving 
thence its supposed dates and origins, and who 
have never set themselves by one flash of intelli- 
gence to deal with its meaning and its purpose! 
And this literature, mind, the unspeakably most 
influential, formative, commanding, and control- 
ling literature known since time began ! 



26 



PERSONALITY OF MAN. 



I concede the usefulness of the alphabet critics; 
but why call them " higher critics"? Thomas a 
Kempis was a higher critic than all of them put 
together! 

But to turn to the objection that these things 
are not of God because our higher sense condemns 
the actions related. 

You ask, " Is Genesis inspired? " I should an- 
swer you, " Yes ! Inspired ! Profoundly inspired ! 
Inspired as long as the world lasts!" 

Does anybody say " invented, forged " ? I ask, 
" Where is the inventor or forger so much an im- 
becile as to write out the story of this man Jacob 
— to go no further — and then to seriously dare tell 
us that this poor creature was ' chosen of God' ? " 

Suppose the story of Jacob and his father and 
grandfather an epic, invented by a poet, a saga- 
man, a scribe idealizing. Can you imagine such 
inventor writing out Jacob ? You have examples 
in all literature, from Gautama Buddh to Tenny- 
son's Arthur. Try Homer, try Virgil, try Milton's 
Satan, if you wish ; can you find any sane inventor 
setting out his hero in such phrase and guise as 
Moses (or some other man of the same name) sets 
out Jacob ? 

Can you imagine any critic, from Celsus to Vol- 



PERSONALITY OF MAN 2J 

taire, who would propose to write you down their 
own lives — even their own lives most loftily ideal- 
ized — as a permanent book of human ethics in the 
way Moses, or the other man, writes the story of 
the man whom God says He " loved " ? 

When your metaphysician, your philosopher, 
your scientist, your poet, your autobiographist, 
your historian, your dramatist, from Shakespeare 
down, gives you a hero, do they not all tell you 
what they think a man, a hero, a father of hu- 
manity ought, in their conception, to be — not at 
all what he is ? 

The only book that ever dared to write down 
men, heroes, demigods, beginners of races, fathers 
of ages, " friends of God " just as they were and 
as they are is the one book and the sole book of 
epic and drama true to God, because it is true to 
man — these Biblia. 

The life of George Washington is a myth as it 
is read to-day. The life of Abraham Lincoln is 
fast becoming a myth. No historian has dared to 
tell us, or ever will dare to tell us, the real story 
of these two lives. 

The life of Napoleon Bonaparte is getting itself 
republished, with the republication advertised in 
all the papers, as a new and more rational form 



28 



PERSONALITY OF MAN 



of the Napoleonic myth, which it is proposed to 
impose on civilized consciousness in lieu of the 
" Sunday-school teacher and member of the Young 
Men's Christian Association " myth which Dr. Ab- 
bott wrote out, when I was younger, in Harper's 
Magazine, to the fatal misleading of the mind of 
one generation in the United States. 

I mean to say no writer of the life of Washing- 
ton, Lincoln, Grant, Jefferson, Bonaparte, or Wel- 
lington would dare to write the true life of any one 
of them, as this Biblia writes out the life of Abra- 
ham, Jacob, Moses, or David. 

Therefore they are human, and therefore false. 
They are not inspired. An inspired story is the 
only true story ever written, or ever capable of 
being written, because written from the overworld 
of fact — just plain, bald, shameless, sometimes hor- 
rible fact. Every mere ^-inspired writer, infidel 
or believer, pagan or Christian, feels it bounden 
on him to deny or pass over facts. 

There is no man who would dare to put in print 
the life of any man, or his own life, as this most 
inexorable writer writes down the life of Jacob and 
other people, under the cold mercilessness of fact, 
which is just revelation — fact, the thing that is, re- 
lieved from your poor beclouded conceptions of 



PERSONALITY OF MAM. 29 

what you think the fact ought to be, or even now 
might be, if eternal God would only take your 
advice ! 

Secular history is a collection of myths. We 
can see that in our own experience. There is not 
a man who has passed from our land during even 
the last half-century whose real life exists in any 
history. 

As soon as even a small member of our Con- 
gress is dead, his fellow-members hold a session 
over him, and a half-dozen gentlemen elocutionize 
about him and formulate a mythus officialis! Of 
course, being a small person, the myth-faith ex- 
tends only, as a rule, to his wife and children; 
and they, in spite of their own knowledge that he 
was small — very small indeed — accept and are de- 
lighted with the myth, and make it a part of their 
household worship. 

That is the way myths are made. In fact, as 
far as my personal experience and knowledge go, 
I should say that, by account of writers and biog- 
raphers, gentlemen whom I have known — and 
some of them intimately — have never existed on 
this earth at all ; and that those I thought I knew 
best were shadowy ghosts waving white arms on 
misty mountain summits in some far land to which 



3<D PERSONALITY OF MAN 

no man has ever gone, and from which (it might 
be inferred) no man has ever come. 

The only hard, practical, unmythical history or 
biography in all literature is contained in these old 
Biblia the church holds " inspired." 

So the hero Jacob has all his life told out no 
concealment, no reticence, no invented or stolen 
pretty story like that about George Washington 
and his hatchet ; no glossing over of his sins or his 
family's sins. 

At this time he is on his way returning to his 
own land under what he chooses to consider the 
commandment of God. 

It is not in his day only that men think their 
own desires, or what looks like their own profit, is 
the commandment of God! 

Numbers of us, and, curiously, the more pious 
of us, always are apt to hold our own decisions for 
the commandment of God. Especially when we 
have prayed over the matter, and asked for light, 
we are very sure we have that commandment ! 

I was once consulted by a gentleman who was 
greatly troubled in his mind, almost to the brink 
of black doubt, because in a change he meant to 
make in his business he had made the subject a 
matter, as he told me, of earnest prayer, and he 



PERSONALITY OF MAN 3 I 

was clear, after that, that it was God's will that 
he make the change, and behold, the change had 
resulted in the loss of half his fortune! He was 
very much annoyed about it — even somewhat 
indignant with God about it! 

I suggested that the Lord had left him, in all 
that kind of action, to decide for himself, having 
given him presumable sense, and allowed him a 
tolerable education and some experience in his 
special business ; and that if I were in his place I 
would not be angry with the Almighty because 
He declined to go into the wholesale grocery 
business with me for money in another part of the 
country. 

I have no doubt of this man Jacob's sincerity. 
That is all the record vouches for. He believed 
he was commanded, and therefore, as far as he 
was concerned, having a conscience illuminated up 
to its capacities, he was commanded to return to 
his kindred and his father's house. But he has 
some lessons to learn, which will split that very 
poor conscience wider open before he is much 
older. Esau, the wronged brother, has to be met 
and settled with somehow. Every wrong done 
has to be settled at the last ! 

So, as he approaches the border of the land to- 



32 PERSONALITY OF MAN 

ward which he travels, he sends messengers to the 
brother. The brother has prospered, in his way, 
too. Those outside "the covenant" prosper, as 
this world goes, observe, as well as those inside. 
The elder brother has taken his own line, and he 
is what we would call now a Bedouin chief and a 
man of considerable consequence. He can march 
at the head of four hundred armed men ! A very 
important brother if one have played the knave 
with him! 

He had chosen his course also ; the man of the 
fields, the desert, and the mountains; the hunter, 
the warrior, the desert prince — driven from home 
by the mother who could not understand and never 
loved her strong, rude, but tender elder son, with 
the old fiery Abrahamic blood in him — he too had 
prospered, and he was coming to meet the brother 
who had cheated him and mocked his father's 
blindness and age. 

Angry? I should think so! The desert prince 
comes to meet the fawning, intriguing, smooth- 
tongued brother who had chosen flocks and herds 
instead of honor and manliness, and had cheated 
him out of his highest, if only his ideal, pos- 
session. 

So Jacob prays again ; thanks God for his sue- 



PERSONALITY OF MAN 33 

cess : " With my staff I passed over this Jordan ; 
and now I am become two bands" — makes God, 
that is, the partner in all his knavery with Laban, 
and thanks Him that He has helped his trickery 
to a great fortune ! 

Is it all passed away ? I think I have heard 
gentlemen thanking God for the success already 
attained, and praying for further success — pious 
gentlemen, who paid tithes even — and who hon- 
estly believed that they and their knavish ways 
were under direct protection and direction of 
Almighty God because they decorously attended 
church and paid their pew-rents. 

The Old Testament is still a part of the reve- 
lation — an essential part. We cannot dispense 
with it, even if Moses did not write this particu- 
lar book, nor Isaiah that special chapter. It is 
such a particularly close, practical, revealing book ! 
Such a true-to-man book, and therefore such a 
true-to-God book! 

The character of the younger son of Isaac re- 
mains such a genuine character, for four thousand 
years, of religious people, and of prosperous men 
" chosen of God," that, having been true for so 
many centuries, and nobody disputing the fact that 
it is true now, I am, as it were, obliged to be- 



34 



PERSONALITY OF MAN. 



lieve that no popular novel-writer in an illustrated 
magazine of ancient Syria could have invented it ! 
There is no human experience that makes such 
writers possible. All human experience makes 
the character possible, permanent, familiar, and all 
alive with us now. 

The man's arrangements to meet his wronged 
and outraged brother are entirely natural from his 
character. He sends " presents " before him. The 
desert free-lances are always hungry. They have 
been hungry for four thousand years ! The sheep 
and cattle will appease him. Three cattle- droves 
with herdsmen, all to repeat the same abject lie, 
" A present for my lord Esau, from his servant 
Jacob," are to meet the chief and his hungry 
horde. The capitalist Jacob offers that kind of 
blackmail which capital, in its supreme need, will 
always abjectly pay to dinnerless force. The world 
is a very young world after all — in its babyhood, I 
think. We have scarce advanced in very vital 
things for forty centuries. 

The capitalist was a coward — we say still that 
" capital is timid." The capitalist himself is timid, 
fearful, cowardly. Several of them have volun- 
tarily exiled themselves in these last years from 
^ur own peaceful, happy, and prosperous land. 



PERSONALITY OF MAN 35 

When blackmail must be paid it is a very shak- 
ing time for the capitalist, and this man of ours is 
scared. He is worse — he is an abject coward. He 
sends his presents before him, then his cattle and 
servants, then his wives and children. 

The story is a very pitiful one. The whole 
conduct of the man is unmanly, fawning, mean, 
and lying — the only kind of bearing which wealth 
in the last battle can oppose to force. It is all 
very low. 

When all had passed over the ford of the brook 
Jabbok, this man remained alone, far from the 
danger before him. 

The night was one of fear and trembling. 
" Jacob was left alone. " His cowardice com- 
pelled him to be alone. Once again in the si- 
lences, once more under the watching stars ! The 
old memories come back to him : the tent of his 
father ; the sports of his boyhood, the face of the 
brother he had loved and with whom he had 
shared them; his beautiful mother's eyes upon 
them both ; his stately father's presence, serene 
always, and always princely, whom now, tottering 
under his century of wintry years, he is soon to 
meet. He and the brother he had wronged alone 
left to close the eyes of the blind chieftain of their 



36 PERSONALITY OP MAN 

race, and they, wronger and wronged ! They two 
alone in all the world of the legitimate seed of the 
great prince and sage — " the friend of God." 

It was an hour of heart-searching for this man. 
Flocks, herds, servants, family — all his wealth 
might have already vanished before the wild chil- 
dren of the waste and their fierce lord, for aught 
he knew, and he left, as when he fled a score of 
years before. 

Conscience comes to close quarters with a man 
at such a time. Jacob's conscience, you may be 
sure, was busy with him. In the few strong 
strokes which paint the scene this lies outlined. 
The worth of his life, its hard, uncompromising 
reality, comes to him. He takes stock of himself. 
It is in such supreme moments that a man is 
compelled to weigh his own worth and the worth 
of his life. In the dark of the world he sees, in the 
silence of the loneliness he hears. 

But a man, in the hour that shakes his soul to 
its center, has not alone his own conscience to 
deal with. " God is greater than our heart, and 
knoweth all things." Settle with myself as I 
may, how shall I settle with another? There is 
immanent in conscience another Man, a strange 
Man, not myself, not any other man I ever knew ; 



PERSONALITY OF MAN. 37 

awful, singular, lonely, and yet persistently near. 
I must also settle with Him! 

" What shall I do then with Jesus which is called 
Christ?" cried Pilate, in mortal terror, ages after 
this. " What shall I do with this strange Man, 
who comes and goes about me and about my 
fathers, who is the eternal measure and rule of 
righteousness? How stand I with Him, and what 
shall I say to Him? " 

It is the mystic question heard on all the winds 
of Palestina, heard in all the solemn silences of 
time. This Man, immanent, present at any hour, 
shadowy in dreams, plain at Abraham's tent-door, 
forever ready to judge, forever ready to help! 
The eternal presence of this Man walks the hills 
of the world in these old Biblia! 

And He is here on Peniel. " There wrestles a 
Man with him until the breaking of the day." 

It is grim and awful to come to grips with this 
Man. But the lonely man is going to have it out 
once for all. The hour is a supreme hour. Here 
and henceforth it must be blessing or cursing. 

" Let Me go, for the day breaketh," cries the 
Wrestler. Already the lances of the sun flash red 
upon the hills. The night-fears, and the wrestle of 
lonely self-examination, and the bitterness of si- 



38 PERSONALITY OF MAN 

lence with one's own soul will fade into the cares 
and fears of the breaking day. " Let Me go." 

The man must have grown wonderfully. He is 
changing fast. Already he is lame. The strange 
midnight Antagonist has touched him. He is 
branded, and shall stay branded all his life. Yet, 
" I will not let Thee go, except Thou bless me!" 
"What is thy name?" Mark the question. A 
name describes. In old days they were always 
given to describe, to reveal character, to tell what 
the man, the animal, or the thing is in its utmost 
purpose and meaning. This man's name did re- 
veal. His name rang true. "He said, Jacob" — 
supplanter, knave, defrauder, cheat! 

And then clangs out to the rising dawn and 
the crimson spears of the hosts of the morning the 
blessing : " Thy name shall be called no more 
Jacob, but Israel " — prince of God ! Let the 
new day hear the new name. " The night is far 
spent, the day is at hand." 

All the long night of the ages man has wrestled 
with the awful, eternal, omnipotent Man — wrestled 
undismayed, with straining limbs and palpitating 
muscles and throbbing heart, all the night of doubt 
and fear, of pain of memory and stings of con- 
science. 



PERSONALITY OF MAN 39 

Lamed by the mighty touch, branded forever 
by the finger of the awful Wrestler they have 
dared to grasp; yet because He is a Man they 
have wrestled on, and behold, the cry tingles to 
the fleeing starlight of time, and peals in the vast 
halls of the abiding morning, " Thy name is prince 
of God"! 

I am not going to attack, sneer at, or despise 
my own day. It is good enough for me and you 
— perhaps better than we deserve. But I should 
sneer at it and belittle it, and tell it to go about 
its wretched business and betake itself to the limbo 
of all things forgotten in any sane universe, if I 
believed it for one moment to be only what its 
current talk and writing makes it. 

Man must have his Mahanaims, where the 
angels of God meet him. He must have his 
Peniels, where he meets God face to face and 
lives. He must have his nights of wrestling, and 
bear the brand of the awful touch burned into him 
body and soul, or he has not reached man's sta- 
tion in this world — the place God has prepared 
for him. 

And mark : to get that — there is no vagueness 
about it — he must tell his name. The small per- 
sonality, the finite individuality, has its own abid- 



4Q 



PERSONALITY OF MAN. 



ing permanence, and must stand by itself, endure 
toil, weep and rejoice by itself. 

The secret of the burden and sorrow of our 
years is that we must say " I." 

No wonder the poor Buddhist prays for Nirvana 
— just to drop into the infinite ocean and be lost, 
and leave all oughts and responsibilities behind 
one forevermore ! 

But this terrible religion of the Old Testament 
and the New keeps on, as it has kept on for all 
these awful centuries of human story, insisting on 
the "I." " What is thy name?" What is thy 
meaning? What is thy character? What art 
thou doing? Naming men, individualizing men 
out of all combinations and associations, insisting 
on the individual, and demanding that the individ- 
ual shall answer for himself. 

I do not know in what personality consists. I 
am aware that many philosophers think they do 
know and could make their knowledge clear to me 
were it not for my own stupidity. I regret that 
stupidity profoundly. But it is not so great as to 
conceal from me this : that personality is the most 
wonderful and awful thing in this whole universe, 
as far as I can see ; and that while I know as little 
about its essence as I do about the essence of any- 



PERSONALITY OF MAN. 41 

thing else, the personality, the I-ism, of the beggar 
is a loftier thing than Chimborazo, and a more 
beautiful and terrible thing than Niagara with all 
its thunder and its foam. 

I know, too, that it is in the eclipse, in the hour 
of destiny and the dark, that the personality stands 
most sharply cut in white or black, and that the 
terrible " I " paints itself upon the heavens in glory 
or in shame. 

For the world is an awful world after all. No » 
man would ever have been fool enough to live in 
it, I think, if he had been given the choice. 

It is a dreadful, just, far-searching, and testing 
world, where no tares will, under any supposition, 
produce wheat, and no thistles bear grapes. 

And this, not because it is itself unchangeable — 
for it spins like a top through measureless space 
— -but because there are " I's " upon it which are 
not of it, which amid its changes are changeless, 
amid its passings permanent, and amid its deaths 
immortal ; and who, amid its harvests of a summer, 
sow and reap the sheaves of eternity ! 

And rising from all its voices, of the night or 
the busy day, of the moaning tides or the sough- 
ing forests, of the wind in the long prairie-grass 
or the roar of burning pine-woods, in the cry of 



42 PERSONALITY OF MAN 

the panther watching on the bending bough or 
the song of the thrush in the thicket — from all 
voices of star and sea and woodland comes the 
question to this strange wayfarer whom none know, 
"What is thy name?" Nature presses him with 
his personality ; torments him with it ; allows him 
not for one moment to forget it while he wakes; 
profanes his very rest in sleep, and whispers or 
thunders in his dreams to scare : " Yes, thou art 
an f I.' What is thy name?" 

Well, we might even endure what we call na- 
ture ! But there is no end. We ourselves cry to 
ourselves, "What is thy name?" And we are 
dimly conscious that there is somewhere and some- 
how a Power behind all powers, out of space, out 
of time, but immanent and abiding near by our 
side, who, at any hour of day or night, in blessing 
or in life-and-death wrestle, may demand, " What 
is thy name?" The consciousness of their rela- 
tionship to the Powers unseen, gross as it may be 
among some, crude as it is among all, is a fact 
universal among all who say "I." 

But that this Power is a Person, and this rela- 
tionship so close that it takes the form of clasping 
hands and straining arms and laboring muscles in 
the wrestle for life and lifting, for princedom and 



PERSONALITY OF MAN 43 

for crowning, which can come only in the dawn- 
ing of a new day — this is the conviction which 
scorches the human wrestler with its touch of fire, 
brands him with the brand of the infinite and eter- 
nal Personality which declares him His own; in 
the doctrine of Divine Evolution, a prince and son 
of God! 



LECTURE II. 
PERSONALITY OF GOD. 



45 



Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after My name ? 

Gen. xxxii. 



4 6 



LECTURE II. 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 
HE prayer was natural. Jacob had given his 



own name. Why should he not know, also, 
the name of this strange Antagonist? That He 
was from beyond the world was clear. Some 
Power, some Existence from outside the common 
experience and life of men had been wrestling with 
him, had branded him, lamed him, at last blessed 
him, and made him a prince of God. That the 
Man was no man of his measure Jacob was sure 
without an answer. 

For he calls the name of the place Peniel — " the 
face of God," the face of one of the Elohim he had 
looked upon and yet lived. 

But what was His name ? The inmost charac- 
ter, nature, and personality — what was that? That 
He was a Person there was no question. Jacob 
was sure of that. And he got no answer. Virtu- 
ally it is, "How does My name concern thee? 
Why askest thou after My name? " 




47 



4 8 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 



And this night's question has been the question 
of humanity always. Jacob spoke for all men and 
all times. 

For in the night of the years, on the lonely 
plains of time, some Power, strange and awful, 
some gigantic Force with suggested human or 
celestial semblance, has been wrestling for good 
or ill with men. 

In the long years of bitter struggle in which men 
have been straining toward the dawn, some Power 
beyond their own, beyond anything from the earth, 
has grasped them, dragged them, gripped them, to 
lame or to bless ; and in the agony of the wrestle 
the passionate cry has tingled to the darkened 
skies, " Tell me, I pray Thee, Thy name." 

Who is it that governs the earth and men, and 
conducts the processes of the years? For our 
strength avails not, nor our riches, nor our wisdom. 
Still the world is an awful place and our life has 
awful possibilities. Ruin waits upon the march 
of men, and ruin, many times, from the hands of 
brothers. Plan as we will, our plans go to wreck 
by the stroke of a Hand out of the darkness. Build 
as we will, and our towers and palaces are shivered 
by a blow from a Hand unseen. The mightiest 
growths of time in institutions, in laws, in constitu- 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 49 

tions and social order, watched, guarded, buttressed 
by all care, crumble under a touch we know not 
whence — the touch of a Hand out of the thick 
darkness. 

The sense of the mystery that inwraps the uni- 
verse ; of the ever-present mystery that clothes and 
masters human life ; of the ever-brooding Power 
that dwells in the dark around us, closing us into 
our small span — small, though it be a span of cen- 
turies — the universal sense and conviction, which 
may verify itself by all experience till the instinct 
is confirmed by the calmness of a rational judg- 
ment, makes atheism impossible. 

It is no longer a question of a Power that rules, 
do what we will, do what all men will. 

Outside there in the dark lies Power. Power 
that whirls the generations onward as the cataract 
whirls the brown leaves in the rushing November 
spate — that all men, savage, civilized, ignorant or 
wise, feel to the marrow of their bones. 

You may gather in one congress the statesman- 
like wisdom and controlling guidance of the earth, 
and the wisest-laid plan formulated and decided 
upon, every man present knows, and every thought- 
ful man besides knows, may be blown like a thistle- 
down upon the wind that rises and rushes onward 



So 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 



from the awful hills where the unseen Powers drive 
their chariots of the dark or the dawn. 

"The wisdom of this world is foolishness w T ith 
God." " He taketh the wise in their own crafti- 
ness." He charges the loftiest imaginable intelli- 
gence with folly. The old Hebrew speech carries 
the conviction of the ages. 

No, it is not a question of a Power straining and 
wrestling with human nature from the beginning, 
and branding or blessing it. There has not been 
a race of men discovered yet that has made any 
question of such a Power. And we may be sure 
that the higher the race climbs, the farther its out- 
look over the loneliness, the more it will confess 
the insistence and persistence of this Power. 

It is only in the effervescence of early youth, 
conceited with its discoveries and its rapid gains, 
that men have for one half-intoxicated hour 
dreamed that they could rule alone and gain the 
daybreak without the wrestle ! 

Such a wild hour came, and naturally very early 
— before the Flood — when there were giants upon 
the earth, and a whole new world lay open for the 
conquest of the race in its prime. God had turned 
them loose to conquer ; and they conquered — those 
demigods of the elder day — in a way of whose 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 51 

magnificence we can scarcely dream, I think, 
while we find the mighty ruins of their glory un- 
derlying our oldest civilizations. But the Power 
they had forgotten, in the long reaches of human 
life and human triumph, lay yet behind, and the 
unseen Forces burst upon the earth in its pro- 
foundest security, and " swept them all away." 
The story of the Flood has deeper meanings in it, 
I think, than any likely to emerge in the mere 
physical discussions about it — meanings which will 
yet flash, I doubt not, into light and leading, as 
truths abiding forever in an ethical world. 

No, the question is not about the existence of 
the Power. It is about its nature and its mean- 
ing. "Tell me Thy name." 

It is a present, living cry to-day in every living 
land of living men. It lies at the base of all 
questions, and is the first demand of all thinking. 
All philosophies, all religions, all governments 
and social life, all laws, all business among men, 
have their rise out of this demand — as old as 
man, as abiding as time, perhaps as eternal as 
eternity. 

For it means, "Tell me the world's meaning; 
tell me mine own. Tell me life's purpose, and 
death's. Tell me what time is, and eternity ; what 



52 PERSONALITY OF GOD. 

right is, and wrong ; what truth is, and lies. Tell 
me what heaven is, and hell!'' 

For to know the Master of the universe, the 
Power that lies behind all power and that builds 
and destroys as it will, is to tell man all things, 
that he may give names like the Son of God. 

It is no cry of curiosity only. It comes less 
from the intellect than from the heart. God pity 
the man who has only seen in it a question of 
philosophy for his study and his metaphysics! 
That men do so treat it is one of the most pitiable 
things I know in the story of human intelligence. 
It never has gotten an answer, put as a curious 
question, and it never will. " By searching canst 
thou find out God?" — by search of intellect, the 
same curious search that finds out the nature and 
gives the name to a beetle ! 

I say it is humanity's cry. But not out of its 
brain, not from its study. It is a cry, a passionate 
prayer, to the dark and the dawn, to the night on 
which the blood-red banners of the unknown day 
are even now advancing, from the knees, from the 
lamed and worn wrestler in the midnight mystery, 
half-dream, half-waking, of time — a pitiful cry and 
a prayer: "Tell me Thy name." 

Art Thou good? Art Thou evil? Art Thou 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 53 

neither? Art Thou good to-day, evil to-morrow? 
Blessest Thou by night, cursest Thou by day ? 

From the trampled battle-plain, where the dy- 
ing moan and the dead look with blind eyes to a 
dumb heaven — " Tell me Thy name." From a city 
wrecked by fire, and gutters reeking with blood 
— " Tell me Thy name." 

From cities rich and fair, where stately homes 
mock the splendors and the ease of the barbaric 
kings of old ; where also the starving mother holds 
to her dying heart for warmth the freezing child, 
that shall be found dead there in the morning — 
" Tell me Thy name." From Christian cities where 
fifty thousand dollars a year is counted respecta- 
ble poverty, and where men and women starve in 
hovels notwithstanding, and children grow up half 
human in noisome filth and hopeless misery, not 
man only, but the overlooking angels, with angelic 
tears, cry, " Tell me Thy name/' 

When the land waves yellow with its bending 
harvests, and the summer light sleeps golden in 
the orchards and the woodlands ; when the happy 
homes of men stand thick over all the happy land, 
one answers the cry. It is a lovely world; the 
birds sing in the branches, the bees hum in the 
flowers, the white sails glimmer from light to dark 



54 PERSONALITY OF GOD. 

along the brimming river, the harvestman sings as 
he gathers in, the sun sinks from a happy day, the 
yellow moon throws up her golden shield upon the 
breast of a happy night — "Tell me Thy name." 

The answer seems easy : " Thy name is good- 
ness." 

But look again. The floods are out ! The har- 
vests are whirled away ! Down the flood rush the 
results of the summer's toil in mingled ruin of 
homes and barns and stacks, of beasts and cattle ; 
and the valley is a desolation. 

There is something still to come. The bodies of 
men and women and little children swirl down in 
the whirling flood. "Tell me Thy name now." 

Oh, so many homes of men ! So many happy 
homes of happy men ! The shouts of children in 
the streets! The rose-grown cottage door! The 
stately mansion amid its gardens and its greenery ! 
The cry of sailors in the ships! The clank of 
hammers and the hum of wheels! The cheerful 
faces in the sunny streets! The friendly words 
from lips of friends ! The lighted windows in the 
gloaming! The music through the open doors! 
The happy moon and stars looking down on all! 
"Tell me Thy name/' 

Behold, the bells toll, the death-cart rumbles 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 55 

through the silent streets, the diggers dig hasty- 
graves ! The cottage door, the palace door, wear 
crape. Under the brazen sunlight, under the piti- 
less moonlight, the pestilence is abroad, and Death 
reaps his awful harvest. "Tell me Thy name." 

It is, I have said, an awful world, and a terrible 
life, take it at its best. A few days of shine, many 
days of gray clouds and rain. A little fairness of 
balmy mornings, many storms of lashing sleet and 
freezing hail. Out of the dark, into the dark 
again, and our poor little story is told, and the 
world of living men knows our names no more. 

There is a possibility of what is called " opti- 
mism." That the possibility of the blackest " pes- 
simism " lives beside it has overwhelming and 
shocking evidence in the self-destroyers, who seek 
by their own hands to escape the hell of this pres- 
ent life, at the risk of the hell of any other. 

The years grow more serious as they go on. 
A boy dances along the road one morning gaily 
enough. How sweet a thing just to be alive ! A 
man sits by a desolate hearth one night, and the 
eyes of the boy, his first-born and his pride, are 
closed forever on this earth in the room beyond. 
The leaping feet lie pale and still and ice-cold 
side by side. He has tried all human skill. He 



56 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 



has used all resources of knowledge and wealth. 
He is a man who believes in God, too, and he has 
prayed for the life that has gone. He has wrestled 
with God for it. You tell him he must submit. 
Of course he must! His pastor comes and tells 
him he ought to submit. Ah, that is quite another 
matter ! 

He is down among the grim things of life's utter 
loneliness — the old gaunt, gray, ancient questions 
which man has found ever new since his first child 
lay dead. Conventionalities count for little. Do 
you wonder he cries out in the night the old cry 
of humanity? The beggar's boy is living; the 
little barefoot gutter-snipe runs by his door. The 
ragged little wretches will throng to see the show 
when his son is carried out to-morrow. He is a 
reticent American — one of the race that " always 
grimly accepts the inevitable/ ' His eyes are dry. 
He will sustain calmly to-morrow the drooping 
figure of his boy's mother in decorous fashion, as 
becomes him. He will return the day after to his 
office, and seat himself as usual at his business, and 
give no sign. But to-night and to-morrow night 
and many a lonely night thereafter the cry rings 
all the more terribly out of the dark of his silent and 
lonely wrestle, " Tell me Thy name." " What kind 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 57 

of Power is it — good or bad, divine or diabolic — 
that has gotten me and my life in its pitiless grasp ?" 

But it is not merely loss of one's dearest, the 
sore pain and bitterness of life which comes from 
outside a man, even from his nearest. 

The awful endowment of personality needs not 
for its profoundest, grimmest wrestling-pain any 
stroke from without. 

A man sits alone with himself. He needs no 
coffined form of dearest child or tenderest wife or 
heart's close brother across the threshold. He is 
sufficient to himself when he enters the awful 
chambers of darkness, where his own past, his own 
present, his very self sit down beside him and 
question him. 

God help the poor, starved, cowardly, aborted 
" I " who has not gone off alone, with the coffined 
dead of his own murdered resolutions, the living 
ghosts of his own sins and failures, and has not 
dared to look the ghastly dead and the ghastly 
living squarely in the face! 

Where the " I " is strongest, where the " name " 
is answered to the call and question most emphat- 
ically, there only is the darkness darkest, and the 
awfulness most awful, in the wrestle that breaks 
the bones and blasts the sinews. 



58 PERSONALITY OF GOD. 

There have been men who have made repen- 
tances not to be repented of ; men who have had 
opened to them in the lonely dark the lurid fires of 
God's and nature's and our own poor world's ever- 
lasting wrath against the base, the foul, the false ! 

Yes, there have been true repentances, true 
wrestlings with conscience and the eternal verities, 
" when the wickedness of a man's heels have com- 
passed him about;" when not man's judgment, 
but eternal God's has blasted him ; when he has 
cried in agony to the awful Power that gripped 
the heart of him, " Tell me Thy name." 

Man's judgment, man's law, man's convention- 
alities, man's praise or blame — what are these 
with the Power that has strode out of the ever- 
lasting shadow where the realities hide, straining 
me in His terrible hands ! My poor conceits, my 
wretched speculations about religion, my senti- 
mental woes, and my childish whinings because 
God has not explained to my babyishness the 
mysteries of His universe — where are these, and 
what, when the smoky darkness of the awful night 
is lit only by lurid faces that grotesquely mock my 
own, and while the overshadowing Power holds 
me, accuses me of all I have been and all I am, 
and my own conscience records the accusation, 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 59 

and the awful whisper moans out of the night, 
'ajJLapTTjjia 'auoviov. 

Possible? Yes, possible — " eternal sin." 

To the soul who has gone through such wrestle, 
what wretched babble must much of our religious 
literature, and our preachings and supposed de- 
fenses of the faith, be! 

Let us be thankful if we ourselves have not 
wrestled on the brink of eternal hells and looked 
into the rolling waves of eternal sorrow. But men 
have so wrestled, men are so wrestling now ; and 
there is an awful grotesqueness in hearing your lily- 
handed, dilettante preacher gesticulate and elocu- 
tionize his charming platitudes melodiously — a 
boy, perhaps, who has never known a sorrow or a 
repentance — for the edification of men who have 
wrestled with the eternal Powers on the brink of 
the eternal fires, for life, for help, at cost of 
branded, limping body and limping soul, that they 
may escape 1 5 a[iapTY]|ia 'auoviov. 

The answer to the cry in Jacob's case was, 
" Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after My 
name?" No reply came, no explanation. Has 
any man, to his intensest prayer, ever yet received 
an answer? 

l Mark iii. 29. 



6o 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 



Our library shelves are filled with a mass of 
so-called Natural Theology grown utterly mean- 
ingless. 

The men who wrote on Natural Religion, and 
made Christianity a supplement or an extension, 
had clearly never wrestled. 

They were dealing with questions of the intel- 
lect alone. There is, indeed, a Natural Theology 
in revelation. " The heavens declare the glory of 
God; and the firmament showeth His handiwork." 
But the heavens declare and the firmament shows 
only to him who already believes in God, and that 
He has a glory and has a handiwork. 

By no possible examination, by no closest study 
of what we call " nature " can the human intellect 
answer the prayer, " Tell me Thy name." 

Is " the Power behind phenomena " a name? 
All men have acknowledged a Power behind phe- 
nomena. But is that Power's name Terror or Joy ? 
Is it Wrath or Pity? Is it conscious of itself or 
not? Is it merely electricity? Has it any moral 
quality whatever? Has it a Personal Name? 

And if our speculations on the phenomena of 
nature give us no answer, shall it profit us to turn 
to the metaphysicians — the human spiders who 
spin out of themselves those vast webs of words, 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 



6l 



the words themselves used in arbitrary senses, 
which tangle up the intellect in a confusion like 
madness, each filmy thread promising to lead the 
searcher out of the tangle into light, while he 
creeps round and round an endless labyrinth of 
artificial phrase ? The " ego " and the " non-ego, M 
the " absolute " and the " related/' the " unknow- 
able " and the " conditioned " ! Through what 
a maze have men groped since the vortices of 
Descartes even to our day, finding only words ! 

And what have they reached? The know- 
ledge or the name of the Powers that wrestle with 
humanity ? Is He one or many ? Has He an in- 
dependent existence at all? Is He conscious of 
Himself, if He be a self, or does He make Himself 
conscious only in His creation? Can we know 
Him, or does He even know Himself, except 
in us? 

The wild insanity which makes men think the 
finite can define the Infinite, that the human in- 
tellect which does not understand what itself is can 
construct and define the Eternal, creeps even into 
theology that claims to be revealed, and puts down 
its shallow conclusions as eternal verities. 

Take our First Article of the Thirty-nine. It 
undertakes to define God philosophically in poor 



62 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 



babbling speech; to give us the definition of His 
character and nature — reverently done, of course, 
by reverent Christian men ; and yet see where it 
lands us : " He is without body, parts, or passions." 
That is merely, you see, the definition of what 
men think God ought to be, what they have de- 
cided He must be out of their own thinking. Go 
on ! Take the Second Article, wherein God tells 
for Himself some little about Himself. This Be- 
ing, " without body, parts, or passions," has a Son, 
" very God, of one substance with the Father," 
who has a body, even a human body, with all its 
passions, hunger, thirst, weakness, and who suffers 
" the passion " of death by crucifixion. That is 
God's account about Himself. 

For unless He tell us His name we cannot find 
it. And from the first, as here with the wrestling 
Jacob, to know or hear His name we must get 
down and ask Him; ask Him praying, " Tell me, 
I pray Thee, Thy name." 

We here are all agreed as to one name of this 
midnight W restler. We recognize Him across forty 
centuries by that name, and yet, strangely enough, 
it is a name no man has ever uttered, and of which 
no man knows the syllables. 

There are, in various places of Old Testament 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 63 

story, accounts of the appearance upon the scene, 
and always to deal with men, of a Man who speaks, 
acts as a man, and at the last by a sudden revela- 
tion and conviction (as was long after the case at 
Emmaus, when the two disciples recognized Him 
and He vanished out of their sight) is known to 
be God. He is so recognized by Israel : " I have 
seen God face to face." This Man appeared to 
Abraham as " he sat in his tent door in the heat 
of the day." Abraham talks with Him. He and 
two with Him eat with Abraham ; and they walk 
forth together and talk of the awful woe that waits 
over the cities on the plain below, and Abraham 
pleads with Him, and calls Him by a name. Long 
after He appears to Moses in the flaming acacia- 
bush in the desert, and Moses asks His name. The 
name is a strange one — "I Am." Again, Moses 
begs to see the face of Him who gave the law in 
the mount. God covers him with His hand in a 
cleft of the rock. He sees Him only as His glory 
passes by ; " for there shall no man see My face, 
and live/' And yet afterward, by the walls of 
beleaguered Jericho, Joshua sees a Man standing 
"with His sword drawn in His hand." And 
Joshua goes to Him. " Art Thou for us, or for 
our adversaries ? " " Nay," is the answer ; " but as 



6 4 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 



Captain of the host of the Lord am I now come. . . . 
Loose thy shoe from off thy foot; for the place 
whereon thou standest is holy " — just the warning 
to Moses before. 

This Man, appearing, disappearing, speaking, 
warning, revealing, delivering, judging, is always 
recognized at last, worshiped, and called upon by 
a name. 

No man can tell you the name. But wherever 
you find the word Lord in capital letters in our 
English version, that name stands in the Hebrew. 

I say no man knows its sound. The Hebrew 
never uttered it. When he came to it he read 
another word, Adonai, which we translate " Lord." 
The other is the " incommunicable name" — the 
name especially peculiar and appropriate to the 
awful God. " No man hath seen God at any time ; 
the only begotten Son, . . . He hath declared 
Him." " He that hath seen Me hath seen the 
Father." " All things were made by Him." The 
mystic, unutterable four Hebrew consonants, whose 
vowels are lost, which no man has ever spoken, 
spake the name of the Man who talked with Abra- 
ham, wrestled with Jacob, gave the law through 
Moses, drew His sword by the walls of Jericho. 
Mark now — for that is the point of the argument 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 65 

— He is a Person. He has a name. It seems the 
main point of the teaching, the purpose of all those 
Old Testament revelations, was to make men under- 
stand that God is a Person. 

There shall be no abstraction set before them to 
worship under vague sign and symbol ; no Being 
or mere expression of power or of justice, much 
less of wrath and fury. There shall be a definite 
conception of the Power invisible, as One, and as a 
Man, whatever else He is, with a drawing toward 
men, and a possible, even loving, communion with 
men. He shall appear as a Man, and give His 
messages as a Man, and walk in the garden in the 
cool of the day ; and yet the trailing glory of His 
departure shall proclaim the Bearer of the unknown 
name " of the mystic letters four." 

Yet in the religion thus illuminated, taught, and 
impressed there shall be no similitude. I dare to 
say it is unexplainable by any thinkable law of 
development. Why did not the children carve an 
image of the Man their fathers believed to be God, 
and set it up as a memorial ? In the places of His 
appearing it is the rude stone-heap, the cairn or 
cromlech, or the anointed pillar which marks the 
memorial. But " make no similitude ; take heed 
to yourselves " — " no likeness of anything in 



66 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 



heaven, or in earth, or in the water under the 
earth." 

The Greek did it, and made his deities persons, 
but finite persons, with more power of hand and 
brain, but shameless of all passion and crime. The 
Egyptian believed in divine personality, and taught 
it in monstrous forms. The Hindu did the same, 
and in forms more monstrous and more bestial tried 
to realize the personality of the Powers spiritual. 

One moves through these Egyptian, Assyrian, 
Hindu personalities divine as through a nightmare 
dream of hideous faces and bestial conceptions, in 
a madhouse universe. 

The vague phantasms of the brain, Ormuzd or 
Ahriman ; the formless, shapeless, shadowy Brahm 
of Eastern pantheism or Western dream ; the Power 
that is no Power with any sense but what it finds 
in its own creatures — even these cloud-vanishing 
phantasms are a relief from the dog- headed, cat- 
headed, elephant-headed deities in which the na- 
ture-worshiper sought to express the personality 
of the invisible Powers. 

Whence got the Hebrew Scriptures that bald 
and bold realism which personifies God as a Man, 
and yet never mistakes Him for a mere man? which 
gives Him human arms and hands and eyes and 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 67 

heart, a house, a throne, a footstool, a crown and 
a scepter, a sword and a bow, and yet sternly for- 
bids any likeness, any image, any imagined re- 
semblance ? 

They go farther. They give the awful Power 
unseen every intellectual and moral trait possessed 
by man. He is loving, He is angry ; He is wrath- 
ful, He is pitiful ; He swears, and stands by His 
oath ; He repents, and changes His decree ; He is 
utterly human, only without sin. There is no 
more intense, individualized, clear-cut personality 
in all history or drama than this God of the Old 
Testament, with the incommunicable name. 

The utmost stretch of human genius in the crea- 
tion of character has never yet approached the 
vivid individuality and personality of this Person, 
marked in those old books by the name forever 
hidden in the " mystic letters four." 1 

There is a wonderful thing extant for some 
years now, born in Germany — in whose theologi- 
cal schools Christ and His gospel are still on trial, 
as if Pilate's court were a perpetually sitting tribu- 
nal — and imported free from tariff or duty into 
England and America, called by somebody — for 
what reason I know not — " the Higher Criticism." 

1 njiT 



68 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 



One might ask, If this be higher criticism, what 
is lower criticism, and what the very lowest at 
last? 

Well, it is all pure guesswork, let me say at once, 
and in its most characteristic development may be 
understood from a learned book published in this 
country, called " The Shakespeare Cipher/' by 
a very able man ; and also by a new and better 
" Shakespeare Cipher," published by a learned 
doctor of medicine, to show that the whole mass 
of poetry we call Shakespeare's was written by 
Francis Bacon to abuse Queen Elizabeth, and send 
her down branded to all time, because she refused 
to acknowledge him, Francis Bacon, as her son by 
a secret marriage with his father when she was 
only the princess, the " Lady Elizabeth"! 

In these two cases the Shakespearian critics know 
the language in which the book was written. It 
is their mother-tongue. It was written three cen- 
turies ago. In the other case there is not a man 
living who could pronounce a speech in Hebrew 
so as to be understood by Isaiah or Daniel (sup- 
posing there ever was an Isaiah or a Daniel ! ). 

It is a sad thing to be idle, especially in a land 
where there are only books, pipes, and beer, and 
where a paternal government presides over a man's 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 



6 9 



birth, education, religion, occupation, marriage, 
sickness, death, and finally his tombstone. 

Turn him loose with the conception that all 
things — government, social order, politics, science, 
and the rest — are settled, untouchable even — in- 
deed everything taken out of the arena of in- 
telligent discussion except Christ and the Bible — 
and he must necessarily turn critic, and, if he has 
little to do, " higher critic." 

The point I am desirous to emphasize is that 
this criticism, in the necessitudes of its conclusions, 
requires us to believe that a great many of the 
ideas, influences, and practices in the Old Testa- 
ment came from Egypt, Chaldea, and Persia. 

Of that, happily, you and I are just as able to 
judge as any critic; for it is not a thing of Hebrew 
consonants or masoretic vowels or accents, but of 
history and common sense. 

Did the Hebrews, upon their return from cap- 
tivity, reedit or rewrite and reorder their sacred 
books under the influence of the Persian dualism? 
And do you so account for the final bitterness 
against all images, and the intensity of the mono- 
theism thenceforward? 

Well, I think you and I are quite competent to 
examine that, if we do not understand a word of 



JO PERSONALITY OF GOD. 

Hebrew. Ormuzd and Ahriman, the gods of 
eternal light and eternal dark, eternal good and 
eternal evil, are no more persons than the cloud 
that floats across the sky. They have not a 
single quality of personality. They are prin- 
ciples, whatever you may mean by that; names 
to express what the old Aryans believed they 
saw in life, time, the world, in the present and 
in the past ; principles contending with each other, 
each now victor and now vanquished; but being 
Aryans, " children of light," having still retained 
enough of the old divine tradition to hold that 
men were on God's side and right's side and 
truth's side, and that the right would be master in 
the end, they stood by Ormuzd and exhorted men 
to do the same, and called their land Iran, " the 
land of light," and the Tartar world, the devil- 
serving world opposed to them, Turan, " the land 
of darkness." 

They were our ancient cousins, and they be- 
lieved in light, and taught their children to ride 
boldly, shoot straight, and tell the truth; and so 
let us honor their memory ! 

But from no notion of their vague principle 
Ormuzd can you derive the clear-cut, realistic 
Personality, the Man whose name is so awful that 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. J I 

you may say God (El), or gods (Elohim), but you 
must not utter His, for one syllable of it spoken 
out would rend the heavens! 

Are we afraid of anthropomorphism? It is a 
long w r ord, and long words ought to scare un- 
learned people. You will find the word a terrible 
one, and a sect-brand and heresy name in church 
story. 

But I want you to notice that neither Old 
Testament nor New is in the least degree dis- 
turbed by what the word means. It is, after all, 
only a Greek compound ; and our new dictionary- 
makers are putting such — thousands of them — 
into our dictionaries of English, so that the big- 
gest English dictionary of this year will be supple- 
mented next year by a new one advertised to con- 
tain "one thousand new words not to be found 
in any other dictionary." These additional words 
are all Greek compounds — or slang ; and the Eng- 
lish dictionary " up to date " contains about five 
complete and distinct languages ; and yet there 
is one entire English language — even two — which 
has never yet been put into any dictionary, and 
this to my personal knowledge ! 1 

1 The negro dialect of the South and the negro dialect of the 
writers of Southern stories. 



72 PERSONALITY OF GOD. 

Now man was made in the image of God. 
That means (real, profound, spiritual theologians 
will tell you) in the image of the Son of God, the 
second Person of the Trinity — such a transcendent 
and overwhelming Personality that He has two 
natures : the infinite and awful nature of God, and 
the poor finite nature of man, each in its utmost 
fullness and perfection; and yet both these natures 
make but one Person! 

That is the Nicene Creed upon Personality. 
That is the immensity of what our poor little An- 
glicized Latin word " person" means at its high- 
est. Heaven help our human stuttering! but that 
is the best we can do. " Tell me, I pray Thee, 
Thy name." It could not be told then. It is 
only half understood now. 

Years after, a man of Jacob's family — a greater 
and a better man — was riding through the same 
land, but on another errand. He was son of 
Jacob's best-beloved, of the tribe of Benjamin, and 
his name was Saul. 

He was on his way to Damascus to arrest and 
drag forth men and women charged with the crime 
of worshiping, in the way men called heresy, the 
God of their fathers. He was to bring them 
bound to Jerusalem to be tried by the sanhedrim. 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 73 

And on the road he too meets the Wrestler. 
The contrast is remarkable. Jacob was left alone ; 
Saul was surrounded with armed men. Jacob's 
meeting was in the night ; Saul's was in the high 
noontide. Jacob's Antagonist appears mysteriously 
and silently out of the dark; Saul's smites him to 
the earth with one burst of overpowering light, 
and calls him by his name. 

But Jacob's question and Saul's are the same : 
" Who art Thou, Lord?" Jacob got no answer 
because he could not understand the name. It 
was ages too early. Saul gets his promptly : " I 
am Jesus whom thou persecutest." 

Jacob was lamed by the touch of the awful 
Wrestler. Saul was blinded. Jacob went limp- 
ing over Peniel ; went limping all his life ; bore 
the brand of the wrestle. Saul went with those 
poor scalded eyes of his — his " thorn in the flesh " 
— all his days, when the scales of total blindness 
fell from them, and pitifully begs consideration 
from the Galatians when he has no amanuensis 
like Luke or Mark or Timothy : " See with how 
large letters I have written unto you with mine 
own hand;" the straggling, clumsy, uncial letters 
— like a child writing " large hand." 

But the answer — " Jesus whom thou persecut- 



74 PERSONALITY OF GOD. 

est." Now Jesus is just the Greek, Latin, and 
English form for the Hebrew Joshua — " He who 
saves," or " God who delivers," or " God's De- 
liverer." And now He can be understood in 
part. 

The awful Wrestler with the souls of men in 
midnight loneliness of the desert, or in burning 
noon on the world's crowded highways, wrestles 
to save. Our God is the Deliverer. If He wres- 
tle and lame, He wrestles to make a prince of God 
out of a knavish Jacob. If He wrestle and over- 
throw and blind the man stricken amid trampling 
horse-hoofs to the sand, He smites to save. His 
name is Joshua; and Saul rises smitten blind, as 
his great ancestor was smitten lame, but an apos- 
tle henceforth, a selected prince in the kingdom of 
heaven ! 

We are slowly coming to see that the spiritual 
law in the natural world is that there is no advance 
save by wrestle and pain, by bloody sweat and 
groaning agony. So men have developed. So 
the lowest forms of life have risen to the higher. 
So nations have builded themselves and become 
" the chosen people," to do the chosen work, the 
princely work of God! 

But this law is an eternal law in the world 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 75 

spiritual, and therefore its manifestation in the 
world we call natural. 

The development of the man Jacob into Israel, 
the prince of God, is by anguish, sorrow, bitter 
pain — Gethsemane's blood-drops; the blinding on 
the road to Damascus, the laming on Peniel. Be- 
cause there is no development of the pneuma 
but by these and the bitter cross, so there is no 
development of the psyche but by toil and suffer- 
ing. Nay, no development of even the soma, the 
mere body, but by the same. 

One might, if he had ears to hear, write, I think, 
the most wonderful poem on the sorrows of the 
material world, whose groans God must hear as it 
struggles upward. " The whole creation groaneth 
and travaileth in pain together until now." 1 The 
spiritual law is an awful law when set to work in 
the natural. I do not wonder we have pessimists. 

But the law is not the expression of blind force. 
The birth-pains and writhing agonies of the regen- 
eration of a world are not the tyrannous inflictions 
of brute power or blind machinery. 

Behind all, over all, in all, rules and reigns the 

1 The victory and the redemption of the pneuma must precede 
the deliverance of the psyche and soma. The struggle of the 
natural must continue until the victory in the spiritual world, 
according to St. Paul. 



76 PERSONALITY OF GOD, 

Person, the Humanity, in whose image we are 
made, and whom we can understand. 

Even that He declared of old in every vision of 
every seer. He came appearing in the likeness of 
the nature He was to take unto Himself forever 
in the mystery of the incarnation, consummated 
nineteen hundred years ago that December night 
under the Syrian stars. 

He had His name in all the old story ; an awful, 
mysterious name, declaring eternal existence and 
eternal power ; but a name, a Person. 

Taking on the reality of human nature and mak- 
ing that a part of the infinite Personality, He takes 
a name all men can utter, and all men understand ; 
a name near and dear to souls blinded, staggering, 
struggling, hard-bestead; a name of victorious 
hope; a triumph cry to the muster, the march, 
the battle, and the victory, for a world groaning 
and travailing to the birth of the new day — " I am 
the Deliverer/' 

And He proved the name His own! Let us 
lay our earthly fancies down. We are Christian 
people. There are things on which our earthly 
philosophies babble — the best of them. The world 
is a world of onwardness ; a world where every to- 
morrow is better than to-day ; a world struggling 



PERSONALITY OF GOD. 77 

up to the eternal daylight. That is our hope. It 
is more — it is our faith. We wrestle on. We will 
not let Him go till the blessing comes. And the 
faith weakens not, and the hope dims not, in all 
the sorrow of the burdened years, for we have now 
the name of the Man who is wrestling it into light. 
His name is JESUS ; proved before our eyes in life 
and death. One far more than philosopher — 
though no philosopher greater — Sage and Seer of 
our own kindred, put our Christian thought in 
form for us all — the final proof to earthly sight of 
the name's truth. " I am Jesus," He cried, and 

" Those blessed feet 
Full eighteen hundred years ago 
Were nailed for our advantage 
On the bitter cross." 



LECTURE III. 
RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 



79 



9 



I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God besides Me : 
I girded thee, though thou hast not kncnvn Me; that they may 
know from the rising of the stm, and from the west, that there is 
none besides Me. I am the Lord, and there is none else. L form 
the light, and create darkness : L make peace, and create evil: L 
the Lord do all these things. Is A. xlv. 5-7. 



80 



LECTURE III. 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 

OD, as the books of the Bible represent Him, 
^ is One. That One is a Personality; but of 
such enormous personality that He is three Per- 
sons, and yet one God. There are those who 
stagger at this. I confess I cannot understand 
their mental condition. I am a poor little limited, 
finite existence; as far as anything I can see in 
this world, scarce a square inch in size or mean- 
ing. My poor little time is a few years between 
the eternal past and the eternal future; and a 
large number of those years are spent in uncon- 
sciousness, infancy, and childhood. A good share 
of the hours that are mine, when I really am con- 
scious, are spent in unconsciousness. The night 
comes — an apparently arbitrary arrangement — and 
I am practically non-existent during many hours 
of the short period when I have some force of 
body and of mind. 

81 



82 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 



And then comes the other dark again, and I am 
lost from all men's knowledge and memory as far 
as this life goes. Out of the dark, into the dark 
again. A few years between, of light and dark, 
of consciousness and unconsciousness, of doing and 
being tired of doing, the whirling spokes of light 
and dark spinning me on and away. 

There are a few things I can do, millions of 
things I cannot do. Some few things I know or 
think I know; and if I am a writing or speaking 
man I try to write them or speak them, and suc- 
ceed in some small measure. All the books ever 
written, all the speeches ever spoken, cannot con- 
tain the things I do not know ; the things Plato and 
" broad-browed Verulam " did not know, much 
less the Parliament of Great Britain or the Con- 
gress of the United States ! 

I have seen great libraries — enormous provision 
of space for the collection of human knowledge. 
But you would be obliged to attach them all to- 
gether — the Bodleian, the British Museum, the 
Bibliotheque Royale, the Astor, the Lenox, and, 
the grandest of them all for architectural dignity 
and spaciousness, the Public Library of Boston, 
and all the libraries of all the colleges in existence 
— to hold the books containing what the profes- 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 83 

sors in all the colleges and universities in Europe 
and America do not know ! 

And yet, being only this, I have the dignity of 
personality ! Am I to be startled, amazed, when 
I am told that the Power which makes, orders, and 
guides the universe is one God, and yet in that 
divine nature three personalities? If I were told 
there are a hundred or a thousand, I do not see 
why I should be at all staggered. When I apply 
my logic or my metaphysics to the infinite, I am 
as a beetle undertaking to lecture on astronomy. 
There is no common measure between the finite 
and the infinite. The infinite is not merely an in- 
finite number of finites. Endless eternity is not an 
infinite number of days of twenty-four hours each. 

There is but one possible point of touch between 
the finite and the infinite, and that point is ethical. 
There is no point common of power, of size, of 
extension, of force, of abidance, of knowledge. 
There is no point of comparison, no place or 
ground logical, where you can bring these two to- 
gether, except the point of moral obligation. 

And this moral obligation rests alone upon the 
fact of personality — no person, no obligation; no 
person, no responsibility. Mark it well, and it 
will save you from endless confusion. 



8 4 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 



There is no responsibility, no moral obligation 
in a cyclone ; none whatever in a hurricane ; none 
at all in the great sun over your heads; not the 
shadow of a moral responsibility in all the infinites 
and all the eternities. 

Power behind phenomena expresses nothing but 
power if you leave it with that definition. As a 
being with moral responsibility, sense of duty and 
obligation, and conscience telling me " You must," 
I have a supreme contempt for all the infinites and 
all the unconditioneds, for sun, moon, stars, and all 
powers behind them ; for I am far better than 
they, as the man is better than the brute. I have 
no reverence, and can get up none, and I certainly 
have not an atom of fear, for the power behind 
phenomena, unless that power can prove to me 
most unmistakably that it has sense, decendy, some 
regard for right and truth, and, in fact, is using its 
faculties to do the best it can in its place. 

Do not get scared, and do not abdicate your 
awful right of judgment in the face of mere brute 
force. It is man's prerogative to say, " This is right, 
this is wrong; this ought to be, this ought not to 
be;" and to say so at the mouth of a thousand 
bellowing cannon. And man has done it, and is 
doing it, and will keep straight on doing till he ends. 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 85 

You cannot frighten us by your power behind 
phenomena, no matter how infinite and almighty 
that power is. I am a good deal better and bigger 
than that power, and pass judgment upon its per- 
formances, and praise or condemn them at my will, 
knowing that my judgments shall stand, and know- 
ing that if the power behind phenomena is power 
only, I and my judgments shall still stand when 
phenomena and that sort of power behind them or 
in them have vanished into nothingness. 

The power behind phenomena, to come into 
contact with men, must come as a person. There 
is that strange power in personalities that they can 
understand one another. And the essence of per- 
sonality is moral responsibility. A person stands 
under obligation. It makes no difference whether 
he be a finite or an infinite person; he is under 
obligation ; he is bound by law and duty. 

Does it startle you to say that Almighty God is 
under obligation? Unless He is, you and I can 
have no spiritual relation with Him whatever; 
nay, not even an intelligent relation. We cer- 
tainly can have no moral obligation toward any 
Being who has no moral obligation toward us. 
That is what makes the God of Calvinism, by His 
very definition, forever impossible. A Being whose 



86 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 



sole motive of action is His own good pleasure is a 
Being with whom we have no common bonds. The 
only feeling would be one of abject, unreasoning 
terror. For the brave and the true it might some 
day be imperative duty to defy and resist Him in 
spite of the terror. 

But the God who wrestles with man, and wrestles 
with him as a Man, reveals Himself as a Person, and 
as such in relations and under names of relation ; 
and relations carry responsibility. The unrelated 
can have no responsibility. 

He is a Maker, and a maker is responsible for 
what he makes. A man cannot make a wheel- 
barrow without assuming the responsibility of see- 
ing that it will work, and that in working it will do 
no harm to anybody. 

God reveals Himself as a King. It is another 
name of relation, of duty and responsibility. A 
king must govern his people. He must suffer with 
his people. He must keep watch and ward for his 
kingdom's safety. He must govern firmly, right- 
eously, helpfully, mercifully. He is bound by 
webs of moral bonds to those over whom he rules, 
as they are bound to him. 

God reveals Himself as a Father. Surely there 
is a name of obligation and responsibility here ! A 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 87 

father — we all know a father's duties. And it is in 
such common household and familiar names that 
He tells men His character. A father must take 
care of his family ; guard, shelter, feed, provide for, 
help his family, his children, his helpless ones. 

Why are we afraid to take God at His word? 
Why shrink from the names He uses to reveal 
Himself? Why always fall back into the vague- 
ness and inanity of our metaphysical irreverence 
— as if we thought God did not know Himself, and 
our spider-web words added somehow to His glory 
as Father and King? 

Does He not know? Creator, King, Father, 
Householder, Shepherd, even Employer paying 
wages for a day's work — these are His chosen 
names; and these, you see, are all names of rela- 
tion, and so of responsibility, obligation, and there- 
fore of Personality. 

Thus in a moral world we live moral beings, 
under a moral Lord and Government. The 
" Ought " rules over all, transcends all; reigns in 
the Personality of the Father and King. 

It is an instinct with us to help the Almighty all 
we can. There is something in the fact that we 
are made in God's image that leads us, I suppose, 
to try to create even a universe, no matter how 



88 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 



fantastically. And facing the fact of a world full 
of evil, pain, and sin, we want to explain it all in 
some way to save God responsibility. 

Now observe He does not thank us! He has 
no wish to shirk any part of the responsibility. He 
has made the universe, and He stands by the con- 
sequences, and asks not the help of your meta- 
physics to argue Him out of His responsibility, nor 
your sentimentalities or theologies to apologize for 
Him! 

The Persian dualism was a philosophy to ac- 
count for the existence of evil, and yet hold to a 
good God. For myself, I confess that as a mere 
working hypothesis, apart from revelation, explan- 
atory of facts as they are, it is the only hypothesis 
I as a reasonable man could admit. It is plain, 
direct, deals with the facts, and puts man on the 
side he, as a moral being, should occupy. 

But — the Almighty, the Personality with the 
awful name, declines, by the mouth of the prophet, 
to be relieved of His obligations as Creator! 

In the summons to " Cyrus, His anointed, whose 
right hand I have holden," the prophet proclaims 
the Personality, the unity, and the responsibility, 
in the face of Zerdusht and his two Principles : " I 
am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 



8 9 



God besides me. / form the light, and create 
darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the 
Lord do all these things." " Verily Thou art a 
God that hidest Thyself, O God of Israel, the 
Saviour." 

It is only, I take it, the same desire to shield the 
Almighty from responsibility — a very amiable if a 
very weak and superfluous desire — which prompts 
some good people to hold such notions as restora- 
tionism — that is, that evil men and devils will find 
another chance somewhere, in some other world of 
trial, and be all " saved," as they call it, sometime ; 
and still other good people to hold that all the un- 
converted will just pass into an eternal sleep, and 
only the righteous be immortal. 

I have no quarrel with the temper of these 
dreams; but they make no appeal to my intelli- 
gence, and rather seem impertinent. The eternal 
Wrestler can take sufficient care of His own repu- 
tation ; and if He declares Himself responsible for 
the evils of this world, and makes no excuse, re- 
sponsible for the pain, misery, torment, and wretch- 
edness of this world — I cannot doubt but He will 
justify Himself in any world, as He justifies His 
ways here, more and more, to human faith and 
human reasonableness. At all events, my poor, 



90 RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 

ignorant guesses are quite unnecessary, and per- 
haps, as apologies, impertinent. 

The worship of a responsible God makes what 
some have called " the Scheme of Salvation 99 no 
" scheme " at all, but just the inevitable working 
of an inevitable law. As a " scheme " we know 
nothing about it. The Lord never revealed it as 
a logical scheme at all. He surely never taught 
men that " right views upon the Scheme of Salva- 
tion " were of any consequence. 

The New Testament is just the blossom and 
fruit of the Old. God, being a responsible Father 
and King, must by inevitable law follow His own. 
The shepherd must go after the sheep which was 
lost. The father must meet the prodigal while he 
is yet far off. For the sheep is still the shepherd's ; 
wheresoever it wanders, ownership is not changed. 
The son is still his father's son among the swine ; 
not a whit less so than when the son wears the robe 
and the ring ! Indeed, the title to wear the robe 
and sit at the feast was never forfeited at any time. 
It existed during all the swine-feeding; was 
promptly acknowledged the instant it was claimed ! 

For we are dealing with personalities. And per- 
sonalities are permanent, and the relations between 
them are permanent also. Those connected with 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD, 91 

a personality that is infinite are infinite relations — 
from eternity to eternity. 

So the revelation has been that of a suffering 
God. I take it for too shallow an opinion of the 
atonement to suppose it a three-years' life of 
poverty and a cruel death that men might have 
their sins forgiven in any judicial or commercial 
method, and by the misery and death of One have 
a happy and blissful Mohammed's heaven for all 
eternity ! We cannot take Caiaphas's doctrine of 
atonement. 

Surely there was larger and more rational pur- 
pose in the fact that the divine Wrestler with the 
souls of men took their own nature upon Him and 
became one of them, or rather, in His infinite 
humanity, all of theni, and before their eyes 
wrestled with the world's sufferings, and suffered 
with its sore pains, and was bruised and wounded 
with its death, and died ! 

If suffering be the worst thing, could He choose 
it ? If the ignominious cross and the long agony 
be essential evil, could He choose them and call 
on those He loved to take the same cross and 
follow Him? How strangely blind and half-hea- 
thenish do we still remain! 

Is it not the revelation of a toiling, striving, 



92 RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 

suffering God? Let us get rid of the phantom our 
poor philosophies impose upon us still, the best 
of us. We weave a God out of our own inner con- 
sciousness, and then attribute to Him the character 
we would have were we omnipotent, and omnipo- 
tent as He ! 

In days when king meant autocrat, men ima- 
gined Him an irresponsible despot, doing things 
solely for His own gratification. Even w r hat we 
have dared to call Christian theologies have given 
Him a character and motives which, did they be- 
long to a man, all free, honorable men would con- 
demn with one voice of detestation. 

It is not the character He gives Himself. He 
chooses His own name. He is bound to, and is 
responsible for, and suffers with His own creation. 
There is a depth of awful meaning in those words, 
u The Lamb slain from the foundation of the 
world.' 1 The tragedy of Calvary was an exhibi- 
tion in time and space, that men might know for- 
ever of what goes on in the abysses of the divine 
nature out of time and out of space. 

We Christians confess that Jesus of Nazareth 
was and is the Son of God. Now He had the 
power and also the wisdom — both, we profess, in- 
finite — to choose whatsoever life, being the Son of 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 93 

Man, that He would. He chose the life we all 
know. There was no constraint upon Him from 
without. But He had, we profess, a purpose. 
There was, then, the constraint of a purpose — a 
purpose formed within Himself out of the condi- 
tions of His own nature. 

It was an utterly unselfish purpose. On that, 
not only all Christians, but all unbelievers who read 
His earthly life, are alike agreed. All our pulpits 
inform us that His life is the one model life for 
men. Would any of them dare to gainsay that 
statement? Would any pulpit anywhere, under 
the name of Christian, dare to assert that the life 
of Jesus of Nazareth was not the loftiest life con- 
ceivable for a man — the noblest, bravest, manliest, 
kingliest life? 

We all agree with the pulpits. It is very strange, 
considering the way we ourselves want to live, but 
we all do ! 

But Jesus of Nazareth was God. He revealed 
God in His inmost character. " He that hath seen 
Me hath seen the Father." So, then, that life 
related in the Gospels is God's life. I do not want 
to escape the conclusion. If I did, I fail to see 
how I can ; I am walled in. 

Does it occur to us how utterly contradictory to 



94 RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 

our common conceptions of the divine nature that 
life is? how utterly contradictory — as just a plain, 
bald " not so M — that life is to many of our ac- 
cepted and most orthodox (so called) theologies? 

I confess I am but a child feeling my way — most 
pitifully helpless and blind. The gospel is, to this 
day, a hidden mystery in most part. Those words 
and common works of Jesus of Nazareth are far 
more inscrutable mysteries to me than all the mir- 
acles of Old Testament or New. 

I cannot " stand agaze at Joshua's moon in 
Ajalon " when I read that " after supper He took 
a towel, and girded Himself," and washed their 
feet ; and that He who did so declared, " Have I 
been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not 
known Me, Philip? how sayest thou then, Show 
us the Father ?" " I am among you as he that 
serveth." " Whosoever will be greatest among 
you, let him be your servant." Dare you follow 
out these things to the plainly suggested end? 
Will you turn, as your theologies and pulpits at 
once do, and begin to hedge? 

I confess frankly my terror at what seems to be 
the only possible meaning. I dare not formulate 
it. I believe, however, that it is the very heart of 
the Catholic faith — a faith which looms larger and 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 95 

profounder as the years pass on ; a faith as far be- 
yond our complete understanding now as would 
have been the name Jesus to wrestling Jacob. 
But it is all there in that old Nicene Creed; and 
" the Church of the Future," of which we hear 
sometimes so much in very foolish talk, will just be 
a church large enough, holy enough, wise enough, 
to believe all there is in the Nicene Creed ! 

I just dare, and that only, to suggest it, and in 
a question : Does the Nicene Creed profess faith 
in a God who serves? Do the acts and words of 
our Lord Jesus Christ reveal a King who is the 
almighty and eternal and awful King — awfulest 
and highest — and who, because He is so, is the 
Servant of all ? Did Jesus of Nazareth reveal not 
only a suffering God — we are all agreed on that, I 
suppose — but a responsible God, and therefore a 
serving God ? " If I then, your Lord and Master, 
have washed your feet!" Think of it! If the 
highest place is the place of most obligation, of 
most service! 

This is all with fear and trembling. But we are 
Nicene Christians here. We chant the faith of 
nineteen centuries ; and it is a faith in Personalities 
and in facts concerning those Personalities. That 
creed rings round the world, on every land and 



96 RESPOXSIBILITY OF GOD. 

sea. Its abysmal depths of living meaning will 
never be sounded till the stars are old. But I ask 
again : " Does not the Nicene Creed speak of a 
serving God? " Is not the one God, in the three 
Personalities, doing something all through — mak- 
ing and serving His worlds? 

I say I am but a trembling and ignorant child, 
creeping, I trust not irreverently — certainly hum- 
bly — along the edge of vast abysses — the 'opara xac 
'aopata — the visible and invisible depths and heights 
which I believe our Father has made and keeps. 
But I know He does nothing save by the eternal 
and immutable law of His own personality — and I 
know fathers serve. It is the load upon all of us 
who are fathers. Do we complain? Do we cast 
off the weak? Do we deny the disobedient? Do 
we not bear our burdens and make no sign? Do 
we not still hold to the relationship, and knit the 
broken knots, and try to keep the jeweled bond 
around the family complete? Well, " I believe in 
God the Father Almighty." 

But let us leave these heights and speak of men. 

I say we are all agreed that the life of Jesus of 
Nazareth, which He declared revealed God — a 
thing neither the world nor the church can yet un- 
derstand — is the divinely ideal life for men. The 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD, 



97 



acceptance of that conclusion is the sole rational 
basis for the existence of this church ; for our being 
here together; for our bishops, priests, deacons, 
and laymen ; for our baptisms, confirmations, and 
communions. 

Well, that certainly was a life of service ! The 
mysterious Wrestler from the beginning with men 
stepped out visibly and revealed the law. "The 
invisible Powers wrestle with men; have done so 
from the beginning, will do so to the end. They 
wrestle to serve and to deliver." 

How coolly we put it all by — " Tell me Thy 
name"! "Why askest thou after My name?" 
Do you not see we are in no case to understand it ? 
Because we can only hear what our ears have the 
power to hear. 

We understand Jesus, Saviour, in a small de- 
gree, and for that let us be thankful ! " We are 
in misery, in stress, in pain, in sin, and wandering, 
turned out of our Father's house, lost sheep and 
lost children ; and He has come to save us out of 
our trouble." That is a great deal! Our prayers, 
but especially our modern hymns, are full of that. 
We are grateful, or say we are, that Christ suffered, 
so that I may not suffer — grateful that He saves me 
from what I deserve. I still agree with Caiaphas 



98 RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 

that it is better another should suffer than that I 
should. 

As it seems to me, that is about as far as we 
have ears to hear ; as far as we can understand the 
name. But when we are asked to go on and ac- 
cept the rest of the name — Saviour of all men — we 
do not understand ; because our Lord came to re- 
veal the law of salvation. For He was very plain 
about it : " He that saveth his life shall lose it : and 
he that loseth his life for My sake and the gospel's 
shall find it." 

For, as I take it, our Lord put little weight on 
the question of pain. It must have been to Him 
a very small thing indeed. He deliberately chose 
it, you see. I think that " church of the future," 
when it comes, will get away beyond our present 
ideas about saving from sorrow, labor, or trouble, 
as the end of the salvation of Christ. 

Our Father in heaven must be full of labor and 
sorrow, of care and pain and the bitter sense of 
loss. His eye is never closed in rest. His hand is 
over all His works. He grieves over the sins and 
wrongs of His world. He has a vast realm to ad- 
minister, and He takes care that a sparrow, even, 
is not wronged. Infinite pain in the infinite heart 
of God! 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 99 

Now our labor and care and anxiety in this 
world are all spent and exhausted, as a rule, on 
the effort to save ourselves from pain. That is 
about as far as we have yet attained. We are in 
that respect just where poor Jacob was at the ford 
of the little Syrian Jabbok ! 

Moralists write about this ; preachers preach 
about it ; satirists laugh at it. We are loading our- 
selves down, and making our lives bitter, narrow, 
comfortless, and slavish, to save ourselves from pain. 
The sight, thoroughly seen and appreciated, is piti- 
able. Beings supposed to have sense actually load- 
ing themselves, and groaning as they crawl under 
their loads, lest they should have to carry those 
loads ! 

One of the two or three most enormously and 
absurdly rich men in the country — dead now, and 
enjoying a little rest, I hope — said to me once, " I 
envy you." " Envy me?" I asked. "Yes; you 
are a free man, your own master, and doing and 
saying helpful things to people every day ; and I 
am like a blind horse in a bark-mill, tramping the 
same monotonous path round the safe that contains 
the deeds and securities." 

In the kindness of my heart I offered to relieve 
him at once of some part of his trouble, and bear 



IOO 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 



his burden like a Christian brother, as St. Paul 
commands us. 

I knew exactly where five millions would found 
a university to do enormous good and make his 
name a blessing forever; where another million 
would endow ten missionary bishoprics ; where two 
millions more would build one creditable cathedral, 
and five millions another ; and ten millions would 
be invested so as to relieve our Missionary Com- 
mittee from the stress and anxiety they suffer ; and 
then five millions more could be soundly invested 
so as to produce a respectable sum toward the in- 
struction and Christianizing of our seven million 
negroes. 

This would not have relieved him entirely — in- 
deed, of only a fraction — of his load. He would 
still have been staggering under a burden which 
would crush me. You may be surprised, but 
it is nevertheless the fact, that he politely but 
peremptorily declined my kindly proposal, and 
groaned under it till the load crushed him, and left 
it, just as heavy, for his son to sweat under till he 
too is dead! 

I sometimes think that nothing must so bring 
sorrow and pity to the sorrowful and pitiful heart 
of God as the sight of men like my friend, who 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. IOI 

load themselves down with such back-breaking 
and heart-crushing loads, and obstinately refuse 
help from heaven or earth ! 

And then the idiocy of it. For they are under- 
going all this to escape a possible pain ! They are 
toiling to escape toil ! They are doing slaves* work 
to keep themselves free ! And lo ! the end comes, 
and their lives have had no more outcome and less 
enjoyment than the lives of their own grooms! 

That God, with all His pity and tenderness, 
should worry Himself much over the labors and 
sorrows of millionaires is too much to expect, when 
there are so many ways open by which they can 
cease to be millionaires. " How hardly does a 
rich man enter into the kingdom of heaven !" 

But the pain and toil of men to escape pain 
and toil are always tragical. And the conventional 
gospel that our Lord came to proclaim, as the 
greatest of all good news — that He was going to 
save them from all trouble by taking all trouble 
upon Himself — has not resulted yet in any great 
lessening of the sum of human anguish. 

The conception of God as a Being supremely 
happy and supremely self-pleasing, who one day, 
out of the kindness of His heart, determined to 
take charge of some few, at least, of a wretched 



102 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD, 



race, and save them all inconvenience and give 
them an eternal " good time," with nothing to do 
and everything to get, has become an unthinkable 
conception, I take it, to most thinking people. 
Nevertheless it is the conception, in some more 
or less modified form, which rules and commands 
acceptance in most pulpits, Protestant and Roman 
Catholic. 

Suppose we rise to the other conception — that 
this world is a world of stress and strain, of bitter 
sorrow and stinging pain, of heavy, groaning loads, 
of aching hearts and broken backs ; that our Father 
made it so because, being the world He wanted in 
His wisdom and for His purposes, He must make 
it so by the necessities of His purpose. 

Suppose its pains are " growing-pains." It 
must be wrestled with to get it up to princedom. 
The wrestle is long. The night is long — ages 
long, as men count ages! And in the wrestle the 
awful Wrestler Himself touches and lames. 

But the Maker of the world is responsible for 
His world! He too has no " happy time" with 
it, I think. He too is wrestling the long night 
through. And to teach men that " happiness is " 
not "our being's end and aim," He reveals His 
own character by actually coming to live this life. 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 103 

Not to shun pain in it, but cheerfully, freely, 
gladly to accept it as the law. " Our being's end 
and aim " is to get up, to climb higher, to ascend, 
by any path, no matter how toilsome. Our salva- 
tion is not deliverance from pain, but deliverance 
from halfness, low-downness. Our salvation is to 
be raised. " If I be lifted up, I will draw all men 
unto Me." He was " lifted up," but upon a 
cross ! 

Let us disabuse our minds of pagan ideas. Our 
God does not " lie beside His nectar, careless of 
mankind," like the gods of Greek Olympus. As 
to the gods of German metaphysics, I personally 
know nothing ; nor does any living man — or dead 
one either, for that matter. The only God I know, 
the only God that any sane man can know, I think, 
is Jesus, who was born in Bethlehem, and was in 
stress and strain all His earthly life ! 

He is a wrestling God. He does not seem to 
have cared to be " happy." He does not seem to 
have thought that idleness, wealth, freedom from 
care, rich food, fine houses, fine clothing, the re- 
gard or reverence of men, were at all desirable or 
necessary. Let us not destroy the force of this, 
and lose the gospel, by the poor theological con- 
clusion that He lived this sort of life as an excep- 



104 RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 

tional, temporary thing for a few days, all the time 
anxious to have it over and get out of it, so that 
He could have a happy time again ! 

Can eternal God live a temporary life? Can 
He play a character in a stage-play ? Pardon me. 
But we must be reverent; we must be honest. 
" Jesus Christ the same yesterday, to-day, and for- 
ever" — there is no dramatic exhibition for a few 
years suggested there! 

I am not concerned to " reconcile " all this with 
the imaginations of the metaphysicians. I have 
only to call your attention to the fact that God re- 
veals Himself as a wrestling God from Genesis to 
Revelation. 

There is even a suggestion that He is worn with 
the strain: " Let Me go, for the day breaketh." 

But He owes a blessing, and acknowledges the 
debt and the power of the sorely tried and lamed 
world upon Him : " I will not let Thee go, except 
Thou bless me." A wrestling God in a wrestling 
world ! 

And so I think we have the meaning of the 
world and our own, We are poor and very far 
down yet. One is tempted to use the almost 
threadbare words of our " working hypothesis " 
development here. They will fit in very well, if 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 105 

you will try the experiment, with the soundest 
Nicene orthodoxy. 

We can surely not dream that any of us are 
living Christian lives — I mean by the measure our 
Lord revealed. Our comfortable lives, or our lives 
which we are straining all our faculties to make 
comfortable — it is all the same — are these Christ- 
like? Surely we are semi- developed Christians! 

Take any of our congregations on a Sunday 
morning, from bishop or rector through all the 
pews. How many have the most shadowy like- 
ness to the idea of Christ? Is not the idea of 
every man and woman — I will not say of every 
child, for "of such is the kingdom of heaven " — 
that the important business for which they are put 
into the world is to make themselves comfortable, 
and shun, as far as possible, all trouble and all 
pain? And if they are especially pious and de- 
vout, wall they not plead with God to help them 
do this? 

I am not speaking of mere respectable animal 
men, nor of the pitiable and pitiful women whose 
personality and responsibility begin and end with 
what is called "Society"; I am speaking of men 
with ideas, and of women who have brains under 
their bonnets, and good hearts under the revers of 



I06 RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 



their jackets, and some true faith in God and duty. 
Is not the idea this : that the religion of Christ is 
meant to comfort and help them out of or under 
any trouble or pain they may have ; that they are 
right to try to have as little as possible ; and that 
God, who has infinite hoards of happiness which 
He does not need, ought to be worshiped and 
prayed to for the sufficient supply they need in 
sickness, sorrow, loss, or death? 

Now consider. Jesus Christ was not the excep- 
tional Man. It is you and I that are exceptional. 
We are the oddities, He is normal. He conse- 
quently reveals law; and, being God and Man in 
one Person, He reveals eternal law — that is, the 
law of God's nature, which is the law for this world, 
and for every possible and conceivable world. 

And that law clearly revealed is that comfort is 
not the highest aim here or anywhere for a man, 
nor for a divine Man ; that salvation is not deliver- 
ance from pain here nor anywhere ; that salvation 
is victory — by no matter what toil and bitterness 
endured ; that man, God's child, made in the image 
of God, is not a pain-fearing being, but a wrest- 
ling and a conquering being; that his business is 
to get up — to become a prince, to have power 
with God and men, and to prevail, though he may 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. \oj 

be lamed, crippled, in the process ; that the strain, 
wrestle, laboring of congested lungs and panting 
muscles are nothing if so be that he " prevail"; 
that God wrestles also like a man till the breaking 
of the splendid dawn! 

So you have the law of human life, which is 
the law of the universe, revealed — the law of re- 
sponsibility ! 

When we make a final settlement of social ques- 
tions which we are dilettantizing over now, it will 
be on the basis of that law. It may be a long time 
in coming, but it is bound to come in the end. We 
may have many upheavals and many even bloody 
revolutions, for what I know, before the end 
comes. But the end will come from no evolution 
— though some may think so — of any principles of 
its own, much less of any bread-and-butter and 
animal-comfort principle of our socialists. 

Let me state it : responsibility is destructive of 
what people call comfort. The more intense the 
sense of responsibility, the less "comfort." The 
only beings comfortable, " happy," in the sense of 
our political economists, are animals or the lowest 
races, or the lowest among the higher races. When 
all sense of responsibility, of moral obligation, is 
gone, moral and spiritual pain is gone. 



108 RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 

To be " perfectly happy " — in the sense of these 
people, that is — one must get rid of all conscience 
of responsibility. But what then remains? The 
happiness of a swine. The higher men go, the in- 
tenser their sense of personality — that is, responsi- 
bility, obligation, and duty — the more full of care, 
anxiety, and pain they are, the more unhappy. 

To use the word of Mr. Herbert Spencer and 
carry his thought higher, the more "differentiated" 
any being is, the more exposed it is to pain and 
unhappiness. The highest conceivable being is 
exposed to the highest conceivable pain. 

But the pain with us results from growing. No 
pain, no rising. "No cross, no crown !" How 
often we have seen those words put up in church 
decorations or in " floral decorations/' without the 
slightest notion of their profound meaning! 

The eternal Man was " lifted up " to draw the 
generations after Him, but lifted on a cross. No 
man can be " lifted up " otherwise; no people can 
be, no people ever has been. 

The loftiest men since the beginning, the men 
crowned and sceptered, have been the men who 
cheerfully, but from afar, took sorrow, pain, and 
labor on them, and trod the footsteps of the Man 
of Galilee. "For the salvation of their souls?" 



RESPONSIBILITY OF GOD. 109 

Oh, surely, if you know what the salvation of a 
man's soul means. But I do not think they much 
thought of that. Their prime idea was the Lord's. 
They were trying to save other men; trying to 
help up and on the lame, the weary, and the hope- 
less. They had — and did not know it nor care 
about it — read the riddle of the universe — that 
climbing means weariness ; that the attainment of 
the upper heights means pain ; that royalty is ser- 
vice; that the Creator and the Father has a uni- 
verse to remake and regenerate on His hands, 
("develop," if you will; there is nothing paralyz- 
ing in a word), and has a sore struggle doing it ; 
and that those who are called His sons accept the 
law — the higher, the more bitter the winds blow, 
the colder the long snow-summits ; but the sunlit 
splendor of the dawn must be reached, not for rest 
or enjoyment, but because they are " lifted up," 
nearer service and nearer God, though the soul 
goes limping over Peniel! 



LECTURE IV. 
RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN. 



/ am not alone, becatise the Father is with Me. 

John xvi. 32. 



112 



LECTURE IV. 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN. 

QOME time ago we had in our newest city — 
^ the newest city in the world, indeed — a thing 
called a fair — the Columbian Fair. 

Among the attractions to draw people and their 
half-dollars to this fair there was, besides " the 
Midway Plaisance," with its alleged Turkish danc- 
ing-women and its alleged Hindu nautch-girls, a 
show called the " Worlds Parliament of Reli- 
gions.' 9 

All the " religions " in the world were invited 
most politely to come there and display them- 
selves and say their best say, and tell how they 
came to be " religions " at all. 

Hindu yogis, Mohammedan dervishes, Roman 
Catholic cardinals, Buddhist bonzes from China, 
and " mahatmas " (whatever they are) from Arabia 
were invited to disport themselves side by side 

113 



I 14 RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN 

with Presbyterian and Unitarian doctors of divin- 
ity, with Mormon elders and archbishops of the 
Orient, and show a waiting and eager world which 
religion of all had the most to say for itself, and 
was, on the whole, the most picturesque and pretty 
specimen of " religion " now existent. 

Altogether it was the most astonishing side- 
show of a remarkable fair, and could have been 
imagined and attempted only in the freshest and 
youngest community on earth — a community 
which has not yet quite found out what itself 
means, is dimly groping, mostly on all-fours, to- 
ward a somewhat indistinct conclusion, but which, 
by its very existence, as the gathering-place of all 
men — a sort of colluvies gentium — has not settled 
the question of any divine purpose and meaning 
in itself, much less in the world; and yet, never- 
theless, has a divine purpose and meaning, which 
in due time, and perhaps after much misery and 
many stripes, will appear. 

Well, the fair was held, and the parliament was 
held, with results. The outcome of it all has not 
yet been published to a waiting world. Roman 
cardinals remain Roman cardinals still, and Hindu 
yogis are just as ragged and smell just as strong 
as ever, and the entire generation of cranks re- 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN 1 1 5 

main cranks still, and seem to be continuing their 
species numerously. 

But the story had gone abroad into all lands 
that "the West" is rich. Indeed, it is a super- 
stition even in Europe that all Americans are 
millionaires. I wish we were — at least that bish- 
ops were! How our missionary work would 
drive forward were that the case ! 

So the hungry children of the East came 
swarming with all their rags and all the popula- 
tions and odors thereof — came swarming to the 
" Streets of Cairo " and the " Convent of La Ra- 
bida," and all the other shows — Chinamen, Jav- 
anese, Spanish monks, Buddhists and Brahmans 
from Hindustan, picturesque and ragged Syrians 
from Jerusalem, and venerable rabbis from Poland 
arm in arm with still more long-bearded and un- 
kempt muftis from everywhere except Constan- 
tinople ! 

They came for those new Columbian fifty-cent 
pieces, and to exhibit incidentally their " religion." 
Nowhere but in the wildest dream could such an 
exhibition be taken as serious. 

Of course it was not serious to the gentle, low- 
voiced children of the East. They were after the 
spoils of the West, and many of them were left — 



I 1 6 RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN 

as they no doubt were willing to be — stranded 
upon our hospitable and happy shores. 

Many of us have no doubt had experience of 
these picturesque waifs and strays of the great 
fair — the flotsam and jetsam of the famous " Par- 
liament of Religions " — at our back doors begging 
for cold victuals and old clothes, and without a 
solitary grain of profound Eastern psychology or 
any practical doctrine of reincarnation, an ounce 
of " theosophy " or a spark of " astral spirit/' con- 
cealed about their fragrant persons ! 

One of the fragments of this drift, whose melo- 
dious name I have several times seen in print, 
professed to be a monk of some sort — Brahman or 
Buddhist, I know not which ; but for the present a 
peculiar kind of monk, emancipated from all rules 
that usually govern monks. There are such " dis- 
pensations/' I understand, among all sorts of 
monks. He could eat with anybody who gave 
him anything nice to eat, and drink anything nice 
that was going, and live in general intercourse 
with us benighted Christians, and take no harm, 
because his ecclesiastical superior in India had 
dispensed him from his vows for this time and 
occasion only ; or else because — which sometimes 
occurs — being an " order " of monkery all by him- 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN \ \ J 

self, and therefore his own " superior/* he had just 
dispensed himself! 

He was very picturesque. I do not, I say, 
know whether he was Brahman or Buddhist or 
Mohammedan, though I think certainly not the 
last. But it is of no consequence. He was a 
monk of some sort, and wore a long woolen skirt 
down to his heels and a roll of yellow stuff on his 
head, and people were interested in him on that 
account to start with. (A man's " environment " 
may sometimes have great influence on other peo- 
ple and very little upon himself.) 

Women especially were interested in him. 
Women always are profoundly interested in 
monks. I think they always will be. There is 
here a psychological question more subtle and 
more interesting than any like question in Bud- 
dhism or Brahmanism. It deserves a book all by 
itself by some wise and learned man, so I leave it. 

One lady — cultivated, thoughtful, an American 
woman of the best type — told me how much she 
was impressed by this mild-eyed son of the Pun- 
jab, and how devoted and pious and spiritual- 
minded he seemed to be. 

She told me how he admired the enormous 
energy and victorious march of this Western civil- 



n8 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN. 



ization. To be sure, our religion was nothing — a 
thing of yesterday. It could have no influence 
on the mind — the gigantic mind — of the Hindu 
trained and fed on theosophy and reincarnations, 
and guided generally by " mahatmas " and astral 
spirits — the lofty and spiritual-minded Hindu, who 
adored Siva and Kali and Juggernaut, and who 
was quite content to be a slave, and make slave's 
slaves of his women. But we were far before the 
Hindu in some things — our machinery, our steam- 
engines, our electric dynamos, and the like. 

Then he was staying here in the United States, 
and hoping to get help to establish an Industrial 
School — a School of Mechanics and Engineering, 
of McCormick's Reapers and Singer's Sewing- 
machines, of Patent Plows and Remington Type- 
writers — for his poor countrymen. In these and 
such as these, according to him, lay the future 
hope of the millions of Hindustan. Here was 
where they acknowledged our superiority. (I 
think he did not mention Pears', or indeed any 
kind of soap!) 

Not at all in Bibles (modern thing, your Bible ! ), 
not in creed or prayers (a poor thing of yester- 
day, your creed and prayers! — read the hymns to 
Agni and Varuna), but in steam-engines, electric 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN \ \ 9 

motors, in trolley-cars and the like, lay the re- 
demption of Hindustan, as far as we uninspired 
Westerns could redeem it. In return for these 
they would send us some " mahatmas " ; and there 
is as yet no tariff on " mahatmas." 

I reminded my friend first that of all human 
creatures alive the Hindu is the biggest liar (the 
Syrian always excepted) ; that he really cannot 
speak truth save by accident ; that all writers who 
know our Hindu cousins testify with one voice to 
this, even down to Mr. R. Kipling; and that the 
higher his caste and the more religious the Hindu 
is, the more measureless liar he is ! 

Of course I would not venture to say that this 
gentleman, who had come all the way to our bar- 
barous country, and had run the risk of deadly 
defilement and the spoiling of his Brahm by being 
among us, was deliberately deceiving; but it was 
nevertheless the fact that the British govern- 
ment had established universities and colleges and 
schools of the very kind he named, and was try- 
ing to establish more among his people ; and one 
of the greatest difficulties — indeed, the most seri- 
ous of all — was their absurd, wicked, and inhuman 
system of caste, which stood in the way, and their 
ridiculous religion, which barred the road against 



120 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN. 



all human investigation, 1 and tied a man helpless 
in the dirt-universe, which was mightier than he, 
and which he dare not investigate. Suppose his 
reaper should cut off a cobra's head ! Suppose his 
locomotive should run down a cow! The conse- 
quences are awful, considering the religion which 
makes cobra and cow alike an incarnation of Brahm. 

"But," I said, " here is what ought to be said, 
with all strong, honest utterance, to a soul 
drowned in worm-eaten shams and conceit like 
this poor man; to a soul for whom Christ died, 
steeped and stupid in hereditary lies : 

" 1 Your people are, all things considered, the 
most abject people on earth. We have your 
vaunted " sacred books," and can read them 
as well as you. There is absolutely nothing in 
them ! Your hymns to Agni (Ignis), the fire 
you cook your rice on, your chants to Varuna 
('oopavog, thesky and clouds), are the cleanest of 
your litanies. There are others of your sacred 
books — your real, practical sacred books of your 
practical religion (Sivai'sm, Saktaism) — of unutter- 
able vileness, " their manners none, their customs 
beastly;" and your religious shows and proces- 
sions, your temples and their ornaments, and the 

1 See " Code of Manu," passim. 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN 



121 



sacred chariots and thrones of your idols are un- 
imaginable for their foulness by any soul in this 
country ; and yet you exhibit all these vile things 
as holy before the eyes of your children. Your 
sacred rites corrupted ancient Rome to infamy. 
They would have corrupted modern England but 
for the stalwart faith in the Lord Christ which 
declared your gods to be devils! 1 

" ' For all the historic period you have been 
slaves. Your own native rulers have been mon- 
sters of brutality, bloodthirstiness, and obscenity. 
Only under some foreign conqueror, from Alex- 
ander down, have you had a glimpse of justice, of 
order, or of settled rule — a slight suggestion that 
the world was not managed by beasts. 

" - Your " religion/' as you call the consecrated 
imbecility and foulness which has dominated your 
unhappy souls and bodies, has chained you down 
victims to any human animal strong enough to 
lord it over you. When he has proved himself 
strong enough, you have gone on all-fours and 
licked his feet. 

l I need scarcely say that the religion of Hindustan has not 
been Vedic for centuries. The Vedas, the Brahmanas (sacrificial 
and priestly forms) are childish. The sacred books of the prac- 
tical religion (which is the foulest idolatry) are worthy of the reli- 
gion of Siva and Kali. 



122 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAX. 



" ' In one of the fairest and fruitfulest lands on 
earth you have lived in the mire for ages. 

" ' The only monuments of your labor are the 
temples of your brutal gods and the palaces of 
your almost as brutal rajas, whom nevertheless 
you have considered divine. 

" ' You have starved in your wretchedness and 
rotted in your cholera. You have let the beasts 
destroy you and the serpents poison you. You 
have had no energy, no manliness, and no hope. 

" ' There are two hundred millions of you, and 
two hundred thousand Englishmen govern you ; 
and for the first time in all your recorded history 
they have given you a decent, orderly, just gov- 
ernment, so that a ryot's rice-field is securely his 
own, his mud hut and his wife and children belong 
to himself, and you are no more allowed to burn 
women alive as a holy obligation. 

" ' And you, and such as you — the Brahmans and 
the sacred men, the monks and holy men — are, 
in all ways you can, putting obstacles in the way ; 
taking advantage of the educational opportunities 
given you by Christians, and then sneering at the 
hand that gives them and at the principles which 
are trying to save your wretched people into some- 
thing human ; in your hereditary conceit and im- 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN 123 

becile slavery to the idea of your own superiority 
— what you call, poor creatures ! your " divin- 
ity " — doing your utmost against the detestable 
Christian and revolutionary principle which de- 
clares a Pariah just as good as a lazy Brahman 
with his holy string! 

" ' No ! It is not machinery you want, but Chris- 
tianity. Strange as it may seem to you, that is 
nevertheless the practical fact. For mind, Chris- 
tianity is in no sense a religion, as you Orientals 
take religion. It is not a means of getting a man 
out of trouble and toil and heartbreak. It is 
rather an arrangement which puts him into these 
neck-deep. The things you call religion have for 
their end the saving men from labor, pain, and 
struggle. This strange religion of the West — this 
religion of the Man who worked in the carpenter's 
shop at Nazareth — calls them to all three; pro- 
claims all three blessed, human, and divine ; pro- 
claims them victorious, royal, masterful over a 
universe governed by reason, as we believe it — 
not by brute force, as you believe.' " 

For the religions of the East all have the same 
dread of personality. To be rid of this burden is 
to be blessed. To drop into the infinite life of the 
impersonal, as a snowflake drops in the ocean; 



124 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN 



all, to float as the same drop vaporized floats into 
the fleecy cloud- flocks of even and disappears in 
the splendors of the sunset ; to cease to be person- 
ally conscious ; to be rid of pain and toil, rid of all 
duty and responsibility, and dissolve into the in- 
finite azure deeps — this is attained beatification, 
this is Nirvana and everlasting bliss ! 

To cease to have anything to do, anything to 
say; to be rid of responsibility, which means to 
be rid of personality — the words are equivalent — 
makes this heaven of imbecility man's highest hope, 
and you have destroyed all we Western races call 
manliness, courage, energy, and whatsoever else 
is high and noble. The world is too much for 
humanity. It becomes its master. Man stolidly 
accepts slavery, disease, hunger, the poisonous 
reptile, the jungle, man-eating tiger. He crouches 
helpless before any brutal thing in nature or in 
man. He submits, not nobly protesting, like a 
knight smitten down in the strife, fighting to the 
last gasp ; but like a whipped cur who can only 
crouch and moan and sneak and whine for pity 
from a savage master! 

There is no conquest of the world in him y no 
mastering of nature possible. He deifies the cruel 
powers that destroy him, and carves monstrous 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN 125 

images of obscene and bloody things, and wor- 
ships the bestial and the foul ; for the bestial and 
the foul seem strongest, and there is no call from 
the divine to resist. He digs out his caves of Ele- 
phantis, puts his monstrous gods there, and flees 
the sunlight and the green earth. 

Meanwhile the unbroken jungles shelter the 
venomous cobra and the tiger, and keep safe the 
seed-beds of the pestilence. He pollutes with 
filth the waters of his sacred river, and lays out 
his dying by its side, while the corpses are whirled 
away on the yellow wave, shadowed by the over- 
hanging obscene birds that batten on the ghastly 
forms. For the river is too much for him. He 
has not thought of restraining it. It overwhelms 
his fields, and sweeps his mud hovel and his little 
harvests of rice away; so he calls it sacred, and 
worships Gunga as a god ! The man of the Chris- 
tian West comes, "levees" Gunga as he levees 
the Mississippi, and still the Hindu believes, for 
the present, that Gunga is a god! Brahm is far 
away, impersonal, and also helpless. Some day 
the Hindu will be lost to toil and sorrow, name 
and fame, in the immensity of Brahm — absorbed ; 
a personality no more. 

Conceive a people whose religion, so called, is 



126 RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN 



based upon the idea that existence is the sorest 
curse; that personality is punishment and the 
heaviest penalty; that to cease to be is the su- 
preme good ! Will such a people invent, improve, 
advance, conquer? There comes now and then to 
the surface a sign that here and there among our- 
selves there exist people who can talk and even 
write sentimentalisms about things they do not 
understand, and feign to exploit "the Oriental reli- 
gions." They affect even to sneer at missions and 
missionaries, and admire bonzes, and talk about 
mahatmas. 

Now we know India pretty well. She has not 
been hidden from the world's eye all these cen- 
turies. We know what her religions have done for 
her — where they have left her people — and we can 
make up our judgments upon what strong, just, 
righteous, and somewhat Christian rule has done 
for a people abject — made so inevitably by their 
"religion"! 

It is the preeminence of Christ's religion that it 
emphasizes and demands the name of the person : 
"What is thy name?" It calls out the "I" to 
face the situation. No teacher was ever so ag- 
gressively personal as Jesus. He preaches con- 
tinually His own personality. He cries, " Come 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN 127 

unto Me;" "I will give you rest ; " " Take My yoke 
upon you;" ''/am the good shepherd ;" "/am 
the door;'' "/am the true vine;" "/am the way, 
the truth, and the life;" "No man cometh unto 
the Father but by Me" It is because we have 
heard it all so often, I suppose; because it has 
become a part of our unconscious thinking, that 
we are not startled by the strangeness of this per- 
sistent and matter-of-fact preaching of Himself. 

There is this peculiarity, also, about His deal- 
ings with men about Him, that He calls out the 
personality of all who approach Him. In some 
cases it seems as if the miracle were impossible till 
the personality assert itself. It is will on His 
part : " Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me 
clean." It is faith on the suppliant's part: "If 
thou canst believe, all things are possible to him 
who believeth" The conscious assertion of the 
selfhood, of the individuality, is called for — the 
two persons must recognize each other, and face 
each other, and know each other by name before 
there can be effect. 

Is not the act of faith itself a supreme realiza- 
tion of a man's own individuality, and a strong 
grasp upon the individuality of the Deliverer? 
"I will not let Thee go, except Thou bless me." 



128 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN 



"Who gave you this name?" — the Catechism is 
true to the religion of personality. " A white stone, 
and in the stone a new name written," " the names 
written in the Lamb's book of life " — are not these 
things all on the same line ? 

Is not personality sacred because God is infinite 
Personality? And because man is made in the 
image of God, and therefore a person, is not his 
personality sacred in the eyes of God ? 

For mark, God never overrides the personality 
of man. He persuades, He leads in wise — in- 
finitely wise — ways, and the convincing Spirit 
whispers in the heart, and Jesus stands forever at 
the door and knocks ; but the independence of the 
personality is never outraged. A man shall be de- 
livered by his own choice. He shall climb to the 
princedoms of God, but he shall be the " I " and 
say the " I " at every step. 1 

With a wonderful care the Eternal Personality 
treats the finite. No angel overrides the poor 
human will, nor breaks into the sacred circle of a 
man's individuality. Only devils from the outer 
chaos do that, and are cast out when the Lord of 
persons speaks the word of power to guard His own. 

1 In nothing does Calvinism more outrage Christianity than in 
its doctrine of "invincible grace." 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN 



129 



One word here. Are we always reverent to 
the personality ourselves? Do not well-meaning 
people who go to help in warm brotherly kindness 
often trample rudely and thoughtlessly upon the 
feelings — that is, the individuality — of the poor or 
the suffering they would aid? Do they consider 
always the reserves and reticences of the heart to 
which a soul with a name is entitled ? Do not we 
sometimes brusquely, and in unmannerly fashion, 
break into the sacred solitary rooms in which the 
soul sits alone — or at least try to? Remember 
Jesus " stands at the door, and knocks.' ' He will 
never enter till the door is opened. If you would 
have Him guest you must invite Him. 

Children are often wronged grievously by most 
loving parents. They have a right to themselves. 
Their personality is sacred. They have a right to 
their childish reticences and the little hedge that 
protects their individuality. It is frightful to hear 
such an expression as "breaking a child's will." 
God breaks no man's will. He seeks to make the 
will right. Let us older folk be careful about 
offending "one of these little ones," who are per- 
sons in the image of Christ, and have names by 
which He calls them, while their angels do always 
behold the face of the Father. 



130 RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN. 

There is a terrible loneliness in personality. The 
soul bears its heaviest loads alone. It enjoys its 
profoundest blessedness alone. It suffers alone, 
it repents alone, and it leaves the world alone. 
Friends may be very dear and very desirous to 
aid or sympathize. " The heart knoweth his own 
bitterness/' One must wrestle alone. There are 
times when the nearest and dearest — our heart's 
best brother — can only stand without. Kind 
hands may be eager to clasp ours, and loving 
lips desire to comfort, and ready feet to follow us 
to the brink ; but each of us must step down into 
the dark, cold water alone. 

I take it, in its real sense, no man ever heard a 
genuine confession. There are chambers in the 
soul into which no human foot can enter — of dear- 
est friend or holiest priest. 

For in the extremest assertion of personality 
there can be but one Companion. In the night- 
wrestle the antagonist is Jesus. In His own 
wrestle to come He tells His friends, " The hour 
cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scat- 
tered, every man to his own, and shall leave Me 
alone : and yet I am not alone, because the Father 
is with Me." In the vast halls of loneliness the only 
sound is the echo of the footsteps of God ! 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN 131 

The human personality and the divine have 
alliance. " If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art 
there : if I make my bed in hell, behold Thou art 
there " also. The human has something of the 
awfulness of the divine. 

It is a trust, this personality, and a trust to 
make one tremble; for as far as we know, it is 
never recalled. A man can never get away from 
his past. " The dead past/' in the pitiless strength 
of human personality, is not dead and has no dead 
to bury. 

A man's words and works are stamped with his 
own individuality, branded with his brand, and 
marked with his own signet. He cannot make the 
word unspoken, nor the deed undone. He puts 
something of his personality into all he does, and 
there back of him they lie, the creations of his own 
will gone out into the yesterdays, but living still. 

Even Almighty God — I say it reverently — can- 
not destroy a fact, cannot make that undone which 
has been done. He can forgive the sin — " cut off 
the entail of sin," as Jeremy Taylor speaks; but 
He cannot make the sin not to have been com- 
mitted. So a man projects himself and stamps 
himself upon the universe. It is a compelled 
scientific conclusion that the words we say here 



132 RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN 

will still exist in the material earth while it shall 
stand. We are changing the relations of the atoms 
about us every word we speak, and that changes 
the relation of others ; these are, of course, mingled 
with other changes and to ears are lost; but we 
know that we hear but a small fraction of the 
sounds about us, and it is quite conceivable, as a 
purely scientific matter, that there may be ears 
which hear all the noises, and the shouts and 
chargings, the volleying repulse, the thunder of 
the cannon, and the saber- clash of the last charge 
at Waterloo. 

It is curious that they are not the incidents of 
yesterday which age brooding by the fireside re- 
members best, but the incidents of childhood, the 
friends long dead, the acts and words gone into 
the past; and more than curious — suggestive of 
things terrible — that some boyish escapade, some 
little mean thing done, which had no special con- 
sequences, comes back more vividly to torment 
the conscience than some large wrong of man- 
hood ! 

It has a terrible side to it, this personal life. It 
makes all things so frightfully, uncompromisingly 
real. " I did this ; I said that. I have issued the 
coin from the mint of my personality. I cannot 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN 133 

recall. I have created something. God help me 
if it be evil! The Lord deliver me from my- 
self!" 

But this stern, masterful religion of the Lord 
Christ leaves us no escape from the awfulness of 
the gift, nor from its terrible responsibilities. In- 
stead it tells us to thank God for it ; to strive more 
and more for its larger measure ; that our blessed- 
ness comes from the intensity and aggressiveness 
of our personality ; that it is a growth into the like- 
ness of eternal God to become more and more a 
person, an " I," with every personal trait and qual- 
ity alive — will, affection, faith, love, hope ; that the 
word " I will arise " is forever the word of power 
that delivers when the lost child goes home. 

And now upon the world and men see the effect. 
There is but one companionship eternal for the 
human person — namely, the divine Person. So 
sure is this that the divine Person took human 
nature — that is, all human personality — into one 
Person, never to be divided ! 

Man walks with God. God encourages him to 
walk like God ; shows him his responsibilities as a 
person in a world made and ruled by a Person ; 
shows him his obligations and moral responsi- 
bilities, and urges him up and on. 



134 RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN 

Well, in some faint and half-hearted way the 
Christian peoples have seen this, and are trying to 
fulfil their obligations in the high place God has 
given them. Christianity, because it is a personal 
religion, is aggressive. It means will. It counts 
strength good ; not as such only — it has small re- 
gard for dumb or irrational force. Christ ordered 
the tempest to close its bluster, remember. The 
highest force, the force to be reverenced because 
it is ordered, rational, and spiritual, the force to 
be obeyed, is the force of a personal will. Power 
displaying itself as power is not on God's nor 
man's side. It is diabolic, rather. Power that 
speaks conscience, orderly will, help and not harm, 
salvation, not destruction, is the power our faith 
holds divine. 

I have heard wonder expressed that the religion 
of the mild, pitiful, and gentle Jesus should be the 
religion of the warrior peoples, the aggressive, con- 
quering peoples of the world. One may remem- 
ber a book published some years ago by a very 
interesting man, who tried to construct a new re- 
ligion from Brahmanism and Christianity. The 
book was called " The Oriental Christ." The ob- 
ject was to show that the mild Hindu is repelled 
by our aggressive, masterful Western Christ, and 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN 1 35 

that to convert the Hindus we need to present only 
the tender and pitiful Christ. 

Possibly some of us thought there was more of 
sentimentalism than of religion in this. Yet the 
writer was clearly honest and sincere; and there 
are those among ourselves who have been slow to 
see that the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Cap- 
tain of the Lord's host, and " the King of kings, 
and Lord of lords," with His " vesture dipped in 
blood," is none other than the Nazarene — the 
Lamb slain from of old. 

But why should it surprise us that a religion 
which teaches that the building up of personality 
is the aim of living, life, and effort for man; that 
onward and upward toward the highest is the path 
marked for him ; that the infinite Person in whose 
image he was made calls him to imitate Himself 
— why should it surprise us, I say, that such a 
religion should train the leaders and masters of 
men? 

To believe that there is an eternal relationship 
between myself and Almighty God; that such 
is the relationship that when none else can come 
near me He is with me; that though there were 
not another being in the universe but myself, He 
would be with me; that this relation, personal 



136 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN 



— between persons, not abstractions nor ideas — 
shall stand 

" When the stars are old, 
And the sun grows cold ; " 

that I am here in His world to help Him do His 
work in it in masterful and royal fashion; not to 
shun toil, but to court it; not to shirk responsi- 
bility, but to bear it; not to enjoy, but to suffer, 
as needs must suffer every creature who will climb 
higher, every man and race of men who are 
wrestling out of the old dark into the new dawn ; 
and that, if so be, I must wrestle with eternal God 
Himself alone, that the old cowardice may perish 
and the new courage may be born, and so I 
emerge a prince, at last prevailing, though I go 
limping on the heights of Peniel — this belief, even 
part grasped and part lived poorly, will give you 
the men who are victorious. 

Believed so as to be lived, and fear is gone ; fear 
of all power save the power ordered, moral, right- 
eous, takes departure. A man himself says, yet 
with no arrogance and no insolence — with pro- 
found reverence, rather, and a noble humility — " I 
am a person here among things. I have reason, 
judgment, and a sense of righteousness; I am an 
' 1/ and deliberately make my resolution: 'I will 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN. 137 

arise. 1 Being what I am, I am bound; I am under 
obligation to all around me ; I must stand for the 
best. The worst is my enemy. There are end- 
less days before me ; I cannot rest. ' My Father 
worketh hitherto, and I work/ said the one Son 
of God, in whom and by whom I too am a son ; 
and I am called to work till the hour strikes." 

There is all the onwardness, you see, all the 
restless energy, all the high hopefulness, all the 
dauntless courage of the leaders and the lords who 
have felled the forests, cleared the jungles, drained 
the marshes, and made the homes and the cities 
of men ; have gone one long stride higher and 
made ordered governments, rights, and justice for 
men; and another stride higher still — have built 
churches and vast cathedrals, hospitals and homes 
for the outcasts of a yet semi-barbarous civili- 
zation, proclaiming that men have a Father in 
heaven, and that the most wretched one of all the 
family is still a person, and has relations with the 
rest, and especial relations with the Person who is 
from everlasting to everlasting ! 

Nirvana for him ! Nay ; neither here nor any- 
where, neither now nor forever! In the vast 
worlds and aeons the " I " can have no rest. It 
has been branded by the awful brand of the eter- 



138 RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN. 

nal " I" and branded for everlasting. Evermore 
across the ford that divides from home and 
Father's house he must go limping. He must 
stagger on over the heights of Peniel ! 

In a universe where all things change the person 
stands permanent. No slow wearing of the years, 
no chance nor change, no sudden shock of force, 
no earthquake, no cyclone, changes the person. 
The " I " stands self-conscious in all the years. It 
stands apart and looks at all else from the point of 
its own poise. 

It will watch a star die out in the ethereal deeps, 
(a sun that is, and a system, and whatsoever these 
hold), and think its thoughts and write out its spec- 
ulations in the calmness of a fixed assurance that, 
come what will to suns and stars and systems, it 
will stand outside and still say, "/think," and, 
"My opinion is thus and so." 

It is impossible for the developed personality to 
imagine the universe existing and he not there! 
It is impossible for it to imagine a universe de- 
stroyed and he not there to see ! 

So our religion gives us no respite. We cannot 
detach ourselves from our past. We cannot de- 
cline our future. 

This awful religion of ours still cries " On! " and 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN 139 

still cries " Up!'* Duty, obligation, work, endur- 
ance! " No rest/' you ask me? No rest, surely, 
in the sense we use the word here — self-indulgent 
laziness ; certainly none for a soul not lost. Is the 
lost soul the soul that declines responsibility, 
denies obligation, refuses duty, and so has reached 
Nirvana ? 

" So many worlds! So much to do!" So far 
between the finite person and the infinite Person! 
So many princedoms to attain ! So many services 
to do for God and the creatures of God ! 

Will man, the person, ever reach his highest de- 
velopment? " Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard," 
what God hath in store for His child ! 

Grant it is all mystery. But the mystery must 
contain what is good, princely, noble, manful. 
And what these are must be judged by the ethical 
judgment of the loftiest and purest and tenderest 
men. 

Ease, reward, and the struggle ended; luxury 
and splendors beyond earthly dreaming; crowns, 
scepters, jewels, and golden houses — the noblest 
men care nothing for them now. We are Christian 
men. These things the barbaric kings of Ind may 
make their heaven. The Lord we serve trampled 
on them. We have gone so far up that our noblest 



140 RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN 

trample on them too. Our reward is to win, to 
win again, and once more to win! Give us the 
victory ; let who will take the triumph ! The 
great dead singer spake the thought of men 
named with the conquering name of Christ : 

" Glory of virtue to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong — 
Nay, but she aimed not at glory, no lover of glory she. 
Give her the glory of going on and still to be! 
She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just, 
To rest in a golden grove or bask in a summer sky. 
Give her the wages of going on and not to die." 

Nay, the highest thing on earth conceivable to 
man is the human pneuma. " What know we 
greater than the soul?" Personality is eternal. 
We are ordained for our future. It demands us, 
and will take no refusal. 

And person means obligation, duty, service. 
The world is a world of service. God serves and 
man serves. Shall not every world be a world of 
service ? 

If the " I " win on — which God wants it to do 
and made it to do ; if it become more and more 
an " I," more and more a pronounced and strong 
"I" as it grows nearer its sole companionship, the 
everlasting and awful " I," shall it not find the 
obligations growing, the duties growing, the re- 



RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN. 141 

sponsibilities growing; and shall it not find for- 
ever, as it finds now, and in all worlds, as it finds 
in this, that the growth comes — the development 
— according to the ideal pattern seen in the mount 
of spiritual vision, amid the thunders and lightnings 
of the presence of the infinite " I " — that it can only 
grow and only develop and only be saved from 
Nirvana and eternal death by facing the responsi- 
bilities, doing the duties, bending under the bur- 
dens; and with a ringing cheer of thanks for the 
high privilege, by accepting the everlasting law of 
service ? 

I have spoken of the doctrine of Personality — 
the Personality of God, the personality of man, the 
special, distinct peculiarity of the all-conquering 
religion of Jesus Christ, the Man consecrated to 
deliver — as an awful thing — it is; as a lonely 
thing — it is; as a painful, sorrowing, bitter thing 
— it is. 

But let us not forget the end — our Lord set it 
before men — to become sons of God; to remain 
sons of God when God puts the stars out as you 
would snuff a candle ; princes, because they have 
wrestled with God and men, and have won. That 
is the end of the law of development, according to 
revelation ! 



142 RESPONSIBILITY OF MAN. 

To become a person who is like the Personality 
of God — that is the end. 

"Not enjoyment and not sorrow- 
Is our being's end and aim," 

but to become more and more a person who, upon 
the sands of the farthest shore of space, and in the 
midnight of wrecking worlds, can yet dare to 
wrestle with Almighty God, and say, " I will not 
let Thee go, except Thou bless me ; " and who can, 
in the midst of the flaming spears of the bursting 
dawn, stagger on, upon the summits of the eternal 
hills, on flame with the eternal day, to meet the 
Maker, the awful " I Am that I Am," who has 
dwelt in the thick darkness, and so see God face 
to face, and live! 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 



THE WORLD AND THE LOGOS. 

The Bedell Lectures for 1885. Square i2mo, cloth, $1.00. 

"They deal with the Darwinian theory of evolution, and the unbeliever in that 
doctrine will read the volume with a glow of satisfaction and a feeling that the 
common-sense side of the question— from his point of view— was never before so 
clearly and convincingly put." — Boston Transcript. 



THE WORLD AND THE KINGDOM. 

The Paddock Lectures for 1888. i2mo, cloth, 75 cents. 

"We have but touched upon one or two salient points of the bishop's argu- 
ment. The full force and significance of his stimulating book will, we are con- 
fident, interest all sorts and conditions of readers." — From the Saturday Review, 
London. 

THE WORLD AND THE MAN. 

Being the Baldwin Lectures for 1890, delivered at Ann Arbor, Mich. 
l2mo, cloth, $1.25. 

"And what a rich and rare style he has of putting his thoughts ! Every line of 
shining clearness, familiar in expression, full of verve, bears the mark of ripest 
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New York Observer. 

"COPY." 

Essays from an Editor's Drawer on Religion, Literature, and Life. 
i2mo, paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.50. 

"A good many questions of the present hour are vigorously, intelligently, help- 
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ABSOLUTION 

IN THE LIGHT OF PRIMITIVE PRACTICE. 

I2mo, cloth, 50 cents. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 

Publisher, 
1 and 3 Bible House, New York. 



One Thousand and One Anecdotes 

Illustrations, Incidents, Episodes, Yarns, 
Stories, Adventures, Practical Jokes, 
Witticisms, Epigrams and Bon Mots, 
gathered from all sources, old and 
new, for the use of public speakers 
and others. Arranged and edited by 

ALFRED H. MILES 
12mo, Cloth - Price $1.50 



SOME COMMENTS 

" It is a book to interest all classes of readers, and in every mood 
from grave to gay. It is a neatly printed volume in clear type." 

— The Inter-Ocean, Chicago. 

44 Mr. Miles deserves great credit. Diners-out and society raconteurs 
should welcome with fervent enthusiasm the publication of this book." 

— The Daily Telegraph, London. 

14 This volume is sure to be found useful to several classes of public 
speakers and to be prized by them. As a piece of good presswork it 
leaves nothing to be desired." — The Living Church. 

44 The stories are gathered from all sources, old and new, and, if the 
old predominate, we can recall that ' a good story bears repetition.' 
Our choice is practically unlimited — famed wits, musicians, players, 
preachers, lawyers, doctors, soldiers, printers, misers, rogues, and 
royalty, all contribute their quota to our amusement, and a cursory 
glance at the excellently classified index will suffice to show how much 
one gets in prospect for their money. It ought to prove an excellent 
gift for the solitary man addicted to melancholy." — The Public Ledger, 

44 Of Mr. Miles' collection as a whole one may say that it contains 
little that is not really good and a great deal that is excellent. As a 
volume for occasional reading in moments of leisure or as an antidote to 
attacks of the blues, it offers very manifest advantages. A by no means 
minor attraction of the volume is to be found in the clear and handsome 
typography which has been given to it by the publishers." 

— The Beacon, Boston. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, Publisher 

2 and 3 Bible House NEW YORK 



Two Books for the Times 



By GEORGE HODGES, D.D. 

DEAN OF THE EPISCOPAL THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL, CAMBRIDGE. 



THE HERESY OF CAIN. 

Price, $1.00. 

"The writer has a wonderfully striking way of putting things." 

— Southern Churchman. 

"Full of common sense, eagerly pushing practicable methods of 
philanthropy, almost clamorous for Christian unity, the volume will be a 
surprise and delight to many, even to some who cannot endorse all the 
views presented." — S. S. Times. 

"The reader may not be told in so many words just what the heresy 
of Cain is, but when he gets through with this book he will have no 
doubt about it. It is the heresy of him who denies that he is in any way 
his brother's keeper. Dr. Hodges is an inspired apostle of the new 
philanthropy. This furnishes the title of his opening discourse, but the 
theme runs nearly through the whole book. These addresses are not in 
the conventional type of ecclesiasticism. They are fresh, bright, earnest, 
stimulating. They are the words of a man who 'means business,' and 
they are presented with the directness and clearness of a business-like 
man . ' ' — Christian Reg ister. 



CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN SUNDAYS. 

Price, $1.00. 

"Dr. Hodges believes that Christianity means the bettering of 
common life ; that it has just as much to do with business as it has with 
religion, and six times as much to do with week-days as with Sundays. 
There are twenty-one sermons in this collection, so many eloquent proofs 
that the author's religion is not a thing kept apart for Sundays, but taken 
up every morning with a sense of consecration to his Master's business." 

— Public Ledger. 

1 ' This is a spicy and irresistibly readable book of short essays that 
have a moral purpose and are full of pertinent illustration*." 

— Boston h-erald. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, Publisher 
2 and 3 Bible House - - New York 



The Master's Guide 



for His Disciples 

Being a manual of all the recorded sayings of Jesus, ar- 
ranged for easy consultation and systematic reading, 
with a preface by Eugene Stock, author of " Lessons 
on the Life of our Lord." 

11 The little book embodies a very happy thought in a very happy 
form. The thought was to ascertain what our Lord Jesus Christ actually 
said on various topics, doctrinal, spiritual, and practical, and so to 
present the result of the inquiry as to give real assistance to those who 
desire to know and obey their Master's words. The form adopted is to 
take every one of the recorded sayings of Christ and group them together 
without comment under various headings, so that no part of His teach- 
ings shall be missed. I am sure that every reader will be grateful to the 
compiler for thus arranging for him the words of Him who spake as 
never man spake." — Eugene Stock. 

" It was a happy inspiration that moved the preparation of 
this little volume, which arranges, in a following of the Revised 
Version, all of our Blessed Lord's teachings, topically, in the 
several departments of the whole Christian life and truth. The 
work falls naturally and easily into three main divisions; namely, 
the Devout Life, which groups in a suggestive way all sayings 
of the Master touching Christian worship, the Christian spirit, 
and the Christian virtues ; the Practical Life, which includes 
every teaching of Jesus that is concerned with Christian conduct 
and the Christian relations ; the Intellectual Life, comprehensive 
of all essential Christian truth which He unfolded ; that is to 
say, the spiritual doctrines that were given by Christ to His dis- 
ciples. All these recorded utterances of the word which came 
down from heaven, when looked at aside from their earthly sur- 
roundings, quite detached from their context and classed to- 
gether according to their subjects, present a very striking study. 
The narrow-formed volume is beautifully printed and bound, a 
credit to the publisher, and would be found an uncommonly neat 
and acceptable little gift." — Living Church. 

TO BE HAD IN THE FOLLOWING STYLES: 

1. Dark cloth, red top to leaves. Price, $1.00. 

2. White cloth, full gilt edges (in box). Price, $1.25. 

3. Persian seal, limp, round corners, gilt edges (in box). 

Price, $2.00. 

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Dean Holes Addresses 



Addresses spoken to workingmen from pulpit and plat- 
form. By S. Reynolds Hole, D.D., Dean of Roches- 
ter. Price, $1.50. 

" The Church of England can boast of some very wise Deans, 
a few, very few witty ones, and a long succession of eminently 
good ones. But seldom indeed has one appeared in whose per- 
sonality this triad of excellence has been manifested so conspicu- 
ously as in the author of this book. The few books he has written 
(but those few — how good!), the many words he has spoken, the 
thorough devotedness of his pastoral life as parish priest of a 
small village during thirty years, unite to prove the truth of our 
estimate of him. These addresses and sermons are thoroughly 
characteristic of the man. The platform speeches are a rare 
combination of wit and wisdom quickened by earnest desire for 
the highest welfare of his audience." — Pacific Churchman. 

"The same qualities — naturalness, kindness, sympathy and 
shrewdness — which rendered his reminiscences so pleasant will 
be found to have made this work agreeable also as well as useful. 
Some of the contents have texts and some do not have, but one 
and all are frank, manly, wholesome appeals to the spiritual side 
of human nature to recognize and obey obligations to God." — The 
Congrega tionalis t. 

"We recommend them to all those who have to speak to the 
working class as examples of simplicity and force without vulgarity. 
Some, as that on gambling and betting, are already well known ; 
others, such as 'Do you Read the Bible?' 'Bible Temperance,' 
and ' Who is a Gentleman ? ' deserve to be as widely known for 
their shrewd common sense." — The Churchman, 

" There is but one Dean Hole, and his individuality is stamped 
on every page of this book." — The Literary World. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, Publisher 
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THE RIGHT ROAD 



A Hand-Book for Parents and Teachers. 

BY THE 

Rev. JOHN W. KRAMER. 

12mo f cloth binding, - - Price, $1.25. 



" There is not a dull page in it. Even the bad boy who dislikes moral 
lectures will like pleasant chats : he will take the moral pills for the sake 
of their sugar coating, if for nothing else. Parents will find this excellent 
book helpful in getting their children on the right road and keeping them 
there. " — The Home Journal. 

" ' The Right Road* presents John W. Kramer's plan of giving instruc- 
tion to children, and of arousing their personal interest in the principles and 
practice of Christian morality. By means of simply worded observations, 
and a great variety of short stories, he undertakes to teach a child something 
about personal responsibility, right and duty. Under duty, instruction and 
illustrations are given concerning duties to one's self — such as cleanliness, 
temperance, truthfulness, courage, self-control, order, thrift, culture and 
purity, duties to others — honor of parents, patriotism, honesty, justice, 
mercy, philanthropy, courtesy, gratitude and kindness to animals, duties to 
God — embracing reverence, worship and service. " — The Interior. 

" As a treatise on practical ethics the book has decided merits. It 
treats of nearly all aspects of morality, setting forth the nature and the 
obligation of the various kinds of duty in a clear and simple style and in a 
manner likely to interest the young. The different virtues and vices are 
illustrated by numerous examples in the story form, some of them historical, 
other fictitious, and many of them are fitted not only to illustrate the habits 
of good conduct, but to inspire the reader with a love for them. The book 
is more manly than such books usually are, the strong and positive virtues 
being given the importance that justly belongs to them. The last section of 
the book and duty to God is excellent, and is by no means uncalled for in 
times like these." — Critic. 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, 2 AND. 3 BIBLE HOUSE, HEW YORK, 



REMINISCENCES 



BY 

Thomas March Clark, D.D., LL.D. 

BISHOP OF RHODE ISLAND 

12mo, Cloth. With portrait of the author 
Price $1.25 



' ' The book is a most delightful one, and any reader who fairly 
begins it will not lay it down willingly until it be finished." 

— The Picayune, New Orleans. 

"All churchmen in this country will be refreshed by a perusal of 
this revival of the times and the men that are woven into Bishop 
Clark's biography. A list of the names of the latter would create an 
instant and eager demand for the book. It is written sufficiently in the 
ana spirit and style to give it zest to the last page." 

— The Courier, Boston. 

" His life has been a busy one, and it is a matter for congratulation 
that he has yielded to the importunities of his friends and published a 
volume of his reminiscences. It abounds in character sketch and anec- 
dote, a model of what such a volume ought to be. It has not a dull 
page." — The Advertiser, Boston. 

1 1 The book abounds in pleasant anecdotes and incidents of Church 
history in the United States and of notable characters among prelates 
and pastors. These will render it of especial interest to Episcopalian 
readers, to whom the names are, of course, more familiar than to others. 
But the intense human interest that pervades the book, and its genial 
manner, will effectually prevent its seeming a dull volume to any one." 

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***For sale at all bookstores, or copies sent post-paid on receipt of price 
by the publisher 

THOMAS WHITTAKER 

2 and 3 Bible House New York 



PSALM-MOSAICS 



A BIOGRAPHICAL AND HISTORICAL 
COMMENTARY ON THE PSALMS 

By Rev. A. SAUNDERS DYER, M.A. 

589 Pages. 8vo, Cloth. Price $2,50 



11 Let no one be misled by the title of this book into fancying it a 
work of dry or abstruse theological reading. On the contrary, it is a 
very lively and extensive collection of matter illustrative of the Psalms, 
both prose and verse being employed. It is a sort of commonplace 
book on the Psalter, evidently the work of considerable time and exten- 
sive reading, and arranged with sufficient orderliness and method to 
avoid the appearance of desultoriness. It is a book to lie on one's 
table, to be taken up with the study of each Psalm, and one peculiarly 
rich in suggestive matter. For instance, on the one hundred and thirty- 
sixth Psalm there is given the striking story of its use by St. Athanasius 
on the night when his enemies attacked the cathedral in Alexandria, and 
with each Psalm is usually given some historic association. A good 
index will aid the reader in keeping track of this widespread miscellany." 

— The Churchman. 

44 This is a good book, furnishing much fresh historical matter illus- 
trative of the influence of the Psalms in literature and biography, and it 
will be very useful to all Christians and especially to expounders of the 
Word." — IV. Y. Observer, 

11 A magnificent collection of biographical and historical illustrations 
of the Psalms gathered as a devotional help to the reader in the religious 
life. It is a commentary of unique interest in its wealth of fresh and 
helpful material." — The Parish Visitor. 

44 Rev. A. S. Dyer has prepared a unique and quite interesting book 
for Biblical scholars. It may be described tersely as a collection of 
biographical, historical and miscellaneous illustrations of the Psalms 
gathered from many sources and classified in the order of the Psalms to 
which they relate. It is a book of material which Christians may use to 
advantage. It is not in any sense a connected narrative, but a collection 
of diversified incidents and suggestions of considerable illustrative value, 
and ordinarily of even greater devotional helpfulness." 

— The Congregationalist, 



THOMAS WHITTAKER, Publisher 
2 and 3 Bible House NEW YORK 



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1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724) 779-21 1 1 



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